51 ideas
| 19635 | Hegel produced modern optimism; he failed to grasp that consciousness never progresses [Hegel, by Cioran] |
| Full Idea: Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism. How could he have failed to see that consciousness changes only its forms and modalities, but never progresses. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by E.M. Cioran - A Short History of Decay 5 |
| 8215 | Hegel was the last philosopher of the Book [Hegel, by Derrida] |
| Full Idea: Hegel was the last philosopher of the Book. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Jacques Derrida - Positions p.64 | |
| A reaction: Reference to 'the Book' connects this to the great religions which rely on one holy text. The implication is that Hegel was proposing one big solution to all problems. It is doubtful if many philosophers before Hegel dreamt of that either. |
| 16011 | Hegel doesn't storm the heavens like the giants, but works his way up by syllogisms [Kierkegaard on Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Hegel is a Johannes Climacus who does not storm the heavens, like the giants, by putting mountain upon mountain, but climbs aboard them by way of his syllogisms. | |
| From: comment on Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Søren Kierkegaard - The Journals of Kierkegaard 2A | |
| A reaction: [Idea from SY] This appears to be an attempt at insulting Hegel for his timidity, but it seems to be describing the cautious approach which most modern philosophers take to be correct. [PG] |
| 10468 | A metaphysics has an ontology (objects) and an ideology (expressed ideas about them) [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: A metaphysical theory hs two parts: ontology and ideology. The ontology consists of the entities which the theory says exist; the ideology consists of the ideas which are expressed within the theory using predicates. Ideology sorts into categories. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §02.1) | |
| A reaction: Say 'what there is', and 'what we can say about it'. The modern notion remains controversial (see Ladyman and Ross, for example), so it is as well to start crystalising what metaphysics is. I am enthusiastic, but nervous about what is being said. |
| 5433 | For Hegel, things are incomplete, and contain external references in their own nature [Hegel, by Russell] |
| Full Idea: The basis of Hegel's system is that what is incomplete must not be self-subsistent, and needs the support of other things; whatever has relations to things outside itself must contain some reference to those outside things in its own nature. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Bertrand Russell - Problems of Philosophy Ch.14 | |
| A reaction: This leads to the idealist doctrine of 'internal relations'. It has some plausibility if you think about the physicist's definition of mass, which has to refer to forces etc. Presumably there is one essence for all of reality, instead of separate ones. |
| 3301 | On the continent it is generally believed that metaphysics died with Hegel [Benardete,JA on Hegel] |
| Full Idea: In continental Europe it is widely believed that the metaphysical game was played out in Hegel. | |
| From: comment on Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Intro |
| 19661 | Making sufficient reason an absolute devalues the principle of non-contradiction [Hegel, by Meillassoux] |
| Full Idea: Hegel saw that the absolutization of the principle of sufficient reason (which marked the culmination of the belief in the necessity of what is) required the devaluation of the principle of non-contradiction. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812], 3) by Quentin Meillassoux - After Finitude; the necessity of contingency 3 | |
| A reaction: I pass this on without understanding it, though a joint study of my collection of ideas on sufficient reason and non-contradiction might make it clear. [Let me know if you can explain it!] |
| 10471 | Ockham's Razor has more content if it says believe only in what is causal [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: One might give Ockham's Razor a bit more content by advising belief in only those entities which are causally efficacious. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §03) | |
| A reaction: He cites Armstrong as taking this line, but I immediately think of Shoemaker's account of properties. It seems to me to be the only account which will separate properties from predicates, and bring them under common sense control. |
| 20952 | Rather than in three stages, Hegel presented his dialectic as 'negation of the negation' [Hegel, by Bowie] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's 'dialectic' is often characterised in terms of the triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This is, however, not the way he presents it. The core of the dialectic is rather what Hegel terms the 'negation of the negation'. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Andrew Bowie - Introduction to German Philosophy | |
| A reaction: Interestingly, this connects it to debates about intuitionist logic, which denies that double-negation necessarily makes a positive. Presumably Marx emphasised the first reading. |
| 10749 | Necessary truths seem to all have the same truth-maker [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: The definition of truth-makers entails that a truth-maker for a given necessary truth is equally a truth-maker for every other necessary truth. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §24) | |
| A reaction: Maybe we could accept this. Necessary truths concern the way things have to be, so all realities will embody them. Are we to say that nothing makes a necessary truth true? |
| 10750 | Slingshot Argument: seems to prove that all sentences have the same truth-maker [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Slingshot Argument: if truth-makers work for equivalent sentences and co-referring substitute sentences, then if 'the numbers + S1 = the numbers' has a truth-maker, then 'the numbers + S2 = the numbers' will have the same truth-maker. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §24) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Hence every sentence has the same truth-maker! Truth-maker fans must challenge one of the premises. |
| 21777 | Negation of negation doubles back into a self-relationship [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the 'negation of negation' is negation that, as it were, doubles back on itself and 'relates itself to itself'. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 6 'Space' | |
| A reaction: [ref VNP 1823 p.108] Glad we've cleared that one up. |
| 5645 | The dialectical opposition of being and nothing is resolved in passing to the concept of becoming [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: The concept of being contains within itself it own negation - nothing - and the dialectical opposition between these two concepts is resolved only in the passage to a new concept, becoming, which contains the truth of the passage from nothing to being. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.12 | |
| A reaction: The idea that one concept 'contains' another, or that an opposition could be 'resolved' by a new concept, sounds doubtful to me. For most analytical philosophers, and for Aristotle, oppositions are contradictions, and cannot and should not be 'resolved'. |
| 5646 | Hegel gives an ontological proof of the existence of everything [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: It would not be unfair to say that Hegel's metaphysics consists of an ontological proof of the existence of everything. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Roger Scruton - Short History of Modern Philosophy Ch.12 | |
| A reaction: This is so gloriously far from David Hume that we must all find some appeal in it. The next question would be whether necessary existence has been proved. If so, given death, decay and entropy, what is it that has to exist? 2nd Law of Thermodynamics? |
| 10747 | Accepting properties by ontological commitment tells you very little about them [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: The route to the existence of properties via ontological commitment provides little information about what properties are like. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §22) | |
| A reaction: NIce point, and rather important, I would say. I could hardly be committed to something for the sole reason that I had expressed a statement which contained an ontological commitment. Start from the reason for making the statement. |
| 10748 | Reference is not the only way for a predicate to have ontological commitment [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: For a predicate to have a referential function is one way, but not the only way, to harbour ontological commitment. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §22) | |
| A reaction: Presumably the main idea is that the predicate makes some important contribution to a sentence which is held to be true. Maybe reference is achieved by the whole sentence, rather than by one bit of it. |
| 21755 | For Hegel, categories shift their form in the course of history [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the categories of thought are not fixed, eternal forms that remain unchanged throughout history, but are concepts that alter their meaning in history. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 01 | |
| A reaction: This results from a critique of Kant's rather rigid view of categories. This idea is very influential, and certainly counts among Hegel's better ideas. |
| 21754 | Our concepts and categories disclose the world, because we are part of the world [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the structure of our concepts and categories is identical with, and thus discloses, the structure of the world itself, because we ourselves are born into and so share the character of the world we encounter. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 01 | |
| A reaction: This is a reasonable speculation, but it makes more sense in the context of natural selection, and an empiricist theory of concepts. |
| 22079 | Hegel said Kant's fixed categories actually vary with culture and era [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's disagreement with Kant is that categories are not unambiguously universal forms of human understanding, but are conceived in subtly different ways in different cultures and in different historical epochs. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - Hegel p.95 | |
| A reaction: This may be Hegel's most influential idea. Though he hoped that categories would contain truth, by arising untrammelled from reason, and thereby matching reality. His successors seem to have given up on that hope, and settled for relativism. |
| 10719 | There are four conditions defining the relations between particulars and properties [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Four adequacy conditions for particulars and properties: asymmetry of instantiation; different particulars can have the same property; particulars can have many properties; two properties can be instantiated by the same particulars. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §09) | |
| A reaction: The distinction between particulars and universals has been challenged (e.g. by Ramsey and MacBride). There are difficulties in the notion of 'instantiation', and in the notion of two properties being 'the same'. |
| 10721 | If properties are sui generis, are they abstract or concrete? [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: If properties are sui generis entities, one must decide whether they are abstract or concrete. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §09) | |
| A reaction: A nice basic question! I take the real properties to be concrete, but we abstract from them, especially from their similarities, and then become deeply confused about the ontology, because our language doesn't mark the distinctions clearly. |
| 10716 | There are just as many properties as the laws require [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: One conception of properties says there are only as many properties as are needed to be constituents of laws. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §03) | |
| A reaction: I take this view to the be precise opposite of the real situation. The properties are what lead to the laws. Properties are internal to nature, and laws are imposed from outside, which is ridiculous unless you think there is an active deity. |
| 10720 | We have four options, depending whether particulars and properties are sui generis or constructions [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Both properties and particulars can be taken as either sui generis or as constructions, so we have four options: both sui generis, or both constructions, or one of each. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §09) | |
| A reaction: I think I favour both being sui generis. God didn't make the objects, then add their properties, or make the properties then create some instantiations. There can't be objects without properties, or objectless properties (except in thought). |
| 10714 | The expressions with properties as their meanings are predicates and abstract singular terms [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: The types of expressions which have properties as their meanings may vary, the chief candidates being predicates, such as '...is wise', and abstract singular terms, such as 'wisdom'. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §02) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be important, because there is too much emphasis on predicates. If this idea is correct, we need some account of what 'abstract' means, which is notoriously tricky. |
| 10715 | There are five main semantic theories for properties [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Properties in semantic theory: functions from worlds to extensions ('Californian'), reference, as opposed to sense, of predicates (Frege), reference to universals (Russell), reference to situations (Barwise/Perry), and composition from context (Lewis). | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §02 n12) | |
| A reaction: [compressed; 'Californian' refers to Carnap and Montague; the Lewis view is p,67 of Oliver]. Frege misses out singular terms, or tries to paraphrase them away. Barwise and Perry sound promising to me. Situations involve powers. |
| 10738 | Tropes are not properties, since they can't be instantiated twice [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: I rule that tropes are not properties, because it is not true that one and the same trope of redness is instantiated by two books. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §12) | |
| A reaction: This seems right, but has very far-reaching implications, because it means there are no properties, and no two things have the same properties, so there can be no generalisations about properties, let alone laws. ..But they have equivalence sets. |
| 10739 | The property of redness is the maximal set of the tropes of exactly similar redness [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Using the predicate '...is exactly similar to...' we can sort tropes into equivalence sets, these sets serving as properties and relations. For example, the property of redness is the maximal set of the tropes of redness. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §12) | |
| A reaction: You have somehow to get from scarlet and vermilion, which have exact similarity within their sets, to redness, which doesn't. |
| 10740 | The orthodox view does not allow for uninstantiated tropes [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: It is usual to hold an aristotelian conception of tropes, according to which tropes are present in their particular instances, and which does not allow for uninstantiated tropes. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §12) | |
| A reaction: What are you discussing when you ask what colour the wall should be painted? Presumably we can imagine non-existent tropes. If I vividly imagine my wall looking yellow, have I brought anything into existence? |
| 10741 | Maybe concrete particulars are mereological wholes of abstract particulars [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Some trope theorists give accounts of particulars. Sets of tropes will not do because they are always abstract, but we might say that particulars are (concrete) mereological wholes of the tropes which they instantiate. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §12) | |
| A reaction: Looks like a non-starter to me. How can abstract entities add up to a mereological whole which is concrete? |
| 10742 | Tropes can overlap, and shouldn't be splittable into parts [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: More than one trope can occupy the same place at the same time, and a trope occupies a place without having parts which occupy parts of the place. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §12) | |
| A reaction: This is the general question of the size of a spatial trope, or 'how many red tropes in a tin of red paint?' |
| 10472 | 'Structural universals' methane and butane are made of the same universals, carbon and hydrogen [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: The 'structural universals' methane and butane are each made up of the same universals, carbon and hydrogen. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §07) | |
| A reaction: He cites Lewis 1986, who is criticising Armstrong. If you insist on having universals, they might (in this case) best be described as 'patterns', which would be useful for structuralism in mathematics. They reduce to relations. |
| 10724 | Located universals are wholly present in many places, and two can be in the same place [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: So-called aristotelian universals have some queer features: one universal can be wholly present at different places at the same time, and two universals can occupy the same place at the same time. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11) | |
| A reaction: If you want to make a metaphysical doctrine look ridiculous, stating it in very simple language will often do the job. Belief in fairies is more plausible than the first of these two claims. |
| 7963 | Aristotle's instantiated universals cannot account for properties of abstract objects [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Properties and relations of abstract objects may need to be acknowledged, but they would have no spatio-temporal location, so they cannot instantiate Aristotelian universals, there being nowhere for such universals to be. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11), quoted by Cynthia Macdonald - Varieties of Things | |
| A reaction: Maybe. Why can't the second-order properties be in the same location as the first-order ones? If the reply is that they would seem to be in many places at once, that is only restating the original problem of universals at a higher level. |
| 10730 | If universals ground similarities, what about uniquely instantiated universals? [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: If universals are to ground similarities, it is hard to see why one should admit universals which only happen to be instantiated once. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11) | |
| A reaction: He is criticising Armstrong, who holds that universals must be instantiated. This is a good point about any metaphysics which makes resemblance basic. |
| 10727 | Uninstantiated universals seem to exist if they themselves have properties [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: We may have to accept uninstantiated universals because the properties and relations of abstract objects may need to be acknowledged. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11) | |
| A reaction: This is the problem of 'abstract reference'. 'Courage matters more than kindness'; 'Pink is more like red than like yellow'. Not an impressive argument. All you need is second-level abstraction. |
| 7962 | Uninstantiated properties are useful in philosophy [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Uninstantiated properties and relations may do some useful philosophical work. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11), quoted by Cynthia Macdonald - Varieties of Things | |
| A reaction: Their value isn't just philosophical; hopes and speculations depend on them. This doesn't make universals mind-independent. I think the secret is a clear understanding of the word 'abstract' (which I don't have). |
| 10722 | Instantiation is set-membership [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: One view of instantiation is that it is the set-membership predicate. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §10) | |
| A reaction: This cuts the Gordian knot rather nicely, but I don't like it, if the view of sets is extensional. We need to account for natural properties, and we need to exclude mere 'categorial' properties. |
| 10744 | Nominalism can reject abstractions, or universals, or sets [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: We can say that 'Harvard-nominalism' is the thesis that there are no abstract objects, 'Oz-nominalism' that there are no universals, and Goodman's nominalism rejects entities, such as sets, which fail to obey a certain principle of composition. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §15 n46) | |
| A reaction: Personally I'm a Goodman-Harvard-Oz nominalist. What are you rebelling against? What have you got? We've been mesmerized by the workings of our own minds, which are trying to grapple with a purely physical world. |
| 10726 | Things can't be fusions of universals, because two things could then be one thing [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: If a particular thing is a bundle of located universals, we might say it is a mereological fusion of them, but if two universals can be instantiated by more than one particular, then two particulars can have the same universals, and be the same thing. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11) | |
| A reaction: This and Idea 10725 pretty thoroughly demolish the idea that objects could be just bundles of universals. The problem pushes some philosophers back to the idea of 'substance', or some sort of 'substratum' which has the universals. |
| 10725 | Abstract sets of universals can't be bundled to make concrete things [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: If a particular thing is a bundle of located universals, we might say that it is the set of its universals, but this won't work because the thing can be concrete but sets are abstract. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §11) | |
| A reaction: This objection applies just as much to tropes (abstract particulars) as it does to universals. |
| 10745 | Science is modally committed, to disposition, causation and law [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Natural science is up to its ears in modal notions because of its use of the concepts of disposition, causation and law. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §15) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed at Quine. It might be possible for an auster physicist to dispense with these concepts, by merely describing patterns of observed behaviour. |
| 9225 | Hegel reputedly claimed to know a priori that there are five planets [Hegel, by Field,H] |
| Full Idea: Hegel is reputed to have claimed to have deduced on a priori grounds that the number of planets is exactly five. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Hartry Field - Recent Debates on the A Priori 1 | |
| A reaction: Even if this is a wicked travesty of Hegel, it will do nicely to represent the extremes of claims to a priori synthetic knowledge. Field doesn't offer any evidence. I would love it to be true. |
| 10746 | Conceptual priority is barely intelligible [Oliver] |
| Full Idea: I find the notion of conceptual priority barely intelligible. | |
| From: Alex Oliver (The Metaphysics of Properties [1996], §19 n48) | |
| A reaction: I don't think I agree, though there is a lot of vagueness and intuition involved, and not a lot of hard argument. Can you derive A from B, but not B from A? Is A inconceivable without B, but B conceivable without A? |
| 21758 | Humans have no fixed identity, but produce and reveal their shifting identity in history [Hegel, by Houlgate] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, the absolute truth of humanity is that human beings have no fixed, given identity, but rather determine and produce their own identity and their world in history, and that they gradually come to the recognition of this fact in history. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 01 | |
| A reaction: This quintessentially existentialist idea, most obvious in Sartre, seems to have originated with this view of Hegel's. |
| 20414 | Hegel's Absolute Spirit is the union of human rational activity at a moment, and whatever that sustains [Hegel, by Eldridge] |
| Full Idea: We may take Hegel's Absolute Spirit to be the union of collective, human rational activity at a historical moment with its proper object, the forms of social and individual life that the rational activity is devoted to understanding and sustaining. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Richard Eldridge - G.W.F. Hegel (aesthetics) 1 | |
| A reaction: From this formulation it sounds as if the whole human race might have momentary union, but presumably it is more local 'peoples' that can exhibit this. |
| 3909 | Society isn’t founded on a contract, since contracts presuppose a society [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: For Hegel, society cannot be founded on a contract, since contracts have no reality until society is in place. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Roger Scruton - Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey 28.2 | |
| A reaction: Interesting, and reminiscent of the private language argument, but contracts surely start as deals between individuals (on a desert island?). |
| 4347 | When man wills the natural, it is no longer natural [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: When man wills the natural, it is no longer natural. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]), quoted by Rosalind Hursthouse - On Virtue Ethics Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: Sounds good, though I'm not sure what it means. The application of the word 'natural' seems a bit arbitrary to me. No objective joint exists between the natural and unnatural. The default position has to be that everything is natural. |
| 20646 | Helmholtz used 'energy' to mathematically link heat, light, electricity and magnetism [Helmholtz, by Watson] |
| Full Idea: Helmholtz provided the requisite mathematical formulation linking heat, light, electricity and magnetism, by treating these phenomena as different manifestations of 'energy'. | |
| From: report of Hermann von Helmholtz (On the Conservation of Force [1847]) by Peter Watson - Convergence 01 'Human' | |
| A reaction: I'm increasingly struck by the neglect by philosophers of nature of these amazing developments in 19th century physics, because they prefer the excitement of the latest nuclear physics. There is more philosophical interest in the earlier stages. |
| 20973 | All forces conserve the sum of kinetic and potential energy [Helmholtz, by Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Helmholtz crucially asserted that all forces conserve the sum of kinetic and potential energy; superficially non-conservative forces like friction are simply macroscopic manifestations of more fundamental forces conserving energy at the micro-level. | |
| From: report of Hermann von Helmholtz (On the Conservation of Force [1847]) by David Papineau - Thinking about Consciousness App 4.3 | |
| A reaction: Friction had been a problem case, because it appeared not to conserve energy when it slowed movement down. |
| 4188 | Hegel's entire philosophy is nothing but a monstrous amplification of the ontological proof [Schopenhauer on Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Hegel's entire philosophy is nothing but a monstrous amplification of the ontological proof. | |
| From: comment on Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Arthur Schopenhauer - Abstract of 'The Fourfold Root' Ch.II | |
| A reaction: All massive a priori metaphysics is summed up in this argument, which is right at the core of philosophy. |
| 6686 | Hegel said he was offering an encyclopaedic rationalisation of Christianity [Hegel, by Graham] |
| Full Idea: Hegel claimed that his philosophy was nothing less than an encyclopaedic rationalisation of the Christian religion. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (works [1812]) by Gordon Graham - Eight Theories of Ethics Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: Why did he pick Christianity to rationalise? How can you reason properly if you start with a dogma? |