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Warwick Hegel Conference 2008

 

THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

AT

THE UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

PRESENTS

 

TRUTH AND FALSITY

 

AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HEGEL'S SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT

 

THURSDAY 29 - FRIDAY 30 MAY 2008

 

(Social Studies Building, Ground Floor, SO.21)

 

"True and false belong among those determinate notions which are held to be inert and wholly separate essences, one here and one there, each standing fixed and isolated from the other, with which it has nothing in common. Against this view it must be maintained that truth is not a minted coin that can be given and pocketed ready-made. Nor is there such a thing as the false, any more than there is something evil." Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit

 

"Proof is, in general, mediated cognition. The various kinds of being demand or imply their own kind of mediation, so that the nature of proof, too, will differ in respect of each." Hegel, Science of Logic

 

Speculative systematic philosophy is known for making a bold claim for an absolute knowledge of what there is in truth. Notoriously, however, philosophers working in the tradition of European philosophy still disagree as to the nature of this claim: Does Hegel mean that philosophy can produce a corpus of indisputable knowledge which exemplifies aspects of things, states-of-affairs or events as they are in themselves? What domain of objects or aspects of the real would this knowledge cover? What would be the ontological, epistemological or logical status of those objects or aspects of objects that are left outside of such knowledge? Even the dynamic and developmental structure of the speculative system seems to imply that a notion of absolute falsity must be operative in it, as Michael Theunissen (Sein und Schein) has already pointed out. Moreover, if the speculative system is the sole provider of truth what would be the significance of those other areas of philosophical thinking which occupy the greatest part of the Hegelian corpus, such as for example aesthetics, political philosophy, history of philosophy and philosophy of history? The Warwick Hegel Conference 2008 aims to clarify and hopefully provide specific solutions to these questions and problems.

 

SPEAKERS

 

 Paul Franks (Toronto)

(All or Nothing: Skepticism, Transcendental Argument and Systematicity in German Idealism)

Stephen Houlgate (Warwick)

(Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics; The Opening of Hegel's Logic; An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History)

Anton Koch (Tübingen)

(Subjectivity in Space and Time; An Inquiry on Truth and Time; Truth, Time and Freedom: An Introduction to a Philosophical Theory)

Angelica Nuzzo (City University of New York)

(Kant and the Unity of Reason; System)

Robert Pippin (Chicago)

(The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath; Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations; Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness; Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason)

Robert Stern (Sheffield)

(Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism: Answering the Question of Justification; Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object; Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit; Transcedental Arguments: Problems and Prospects)

 

ORGANIZED BY:

  • Professor Stephen Houlgate
  • Ioannis Trisokkas
  • Lee Watkins
  • Sebastian Stein

 

FUNDED BY:

 

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CONTACT

I.D.Trisokkas@warwick.ac.uk