Hegel and the Problem of the History of Philosophy: The Logical Structure of Exemplarity

Drawing on the work of major philosophers in 18th and 19th-century German idealism, Thomas Raysmith critically examines G. W. F. Hegel’s justification for the claim that philosophy has a history.

While Kant regarded philosophy as ahistorical, Hegel considered it to be a discipline that is necessarily historical, and elaborated a ’logical structure’ that was supposed to allow it to have a history. Calling this structure, which Hegel took to be the fundamental structure of thought itself, ’the structure of exemplarity’, Raysmith presents it as a dynamic reciprocity between universality, particularity and singularity. He provides a historical reconstruction of the shifting conceptions of philosophy from Kant, through J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling, to Hegel, and offers a systematic analysis of Hegel’s Science of Logic based on a close, critical reading.

Offering a compelling and novel reading of Hegel’s thought, Hegel and the Problem of the History of Philosophy is a groundbreaking work for students and scholars of German idealism and the history of philosophy more broadly.

Thomas Raysmith is Lecturer in Philosophy at Bard College Berlin, Germany.