György Lukács’s infl uential interpretation of commodity fetishism as “reifi cation” shapes many contemporary critiques of the apparently objective and impersonal form taken by capitalist social relations. Such critiques seek to debunk the false veil of objectivity that results from fetishism, revealing the real character of the social relations underneath. Th is line of criticism, however, often attributes totalising power to capitalism, which undermines its own critical standpoint. I argue that the solution to this dilemma lies in understanding the fetish not as an ideological veil that needs to be debunked, but instead as a novel form of social interdependence that is genuinely – not illusorily – impersonal. Th is impersonal form is generated by a diverse array of disparate social practices whose interaction yields this unanticipated and unintended result. Within this framework, the diversity of the underlying social practices off ers a practical potential basis for constituting new forms of social interdependence that lack not only the semblance, but also the reality of capitalism’s oppressive objectivity.
The author investigates the parallel conceptions of the overall philosophical goal of M. Heidegger and G. W. F. Hegel. He is of the opinion that the main parallel in the philosophical work of these two thinkers is evident when we compare Heidegger’s conception of the first and second beginning of the history of being with Hegel’s historical scheme of the two phases of the return of the absolute idea to itself. Hegel’s moment of one’s own fully-conscious self-understanding determining the mediation of oneself, and thus overcoming one’s own externality is revealed to be the foreshadowing counterpart of Heidegger’s conception of the overcoming of the first beginning. This overcoming, which Heidegger calls a second beginning, is the overcoming of a movement that substitutes being with the highest being. Heidegger takes the first beginning of the history of being as its necessary initial movement, and only thus can being become aware of itself as the mediating movement of the historical possibility of the second beginning. Hegel’s and Heidegger’s thought are thus revealed to follow analogical and parallel paths in expressing the ultimate conceptions of philosophical thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Georg Lukács, writing in History and Class Consciousness, describes modern philosophy, culminating in the work of Hegel, as providing “a complete intellectual copy and the a priori deduction of bourgeois society.” By closely considering this remark, the following essay will explore the manner in which Hegel’s philosophy stands as a register for the reifi cation constitutive of the capitalist mode of production. After fi rst outlining the fundamental characteristics of Lukács’s theory of reifi ed consciousness, an investigation into culled sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit will demonstrate the conceptual affi nity between reifi ed consciousness and the consciousness of Hegel’s own protagonist. Th e Phenomenology follows the path of a consciousness successively failing to give an adequate account of both itself and the world. Here, the immediate and sequestered otherness of its object obscures the truth that consciousness is the substance of its own process. By analyzing the sections “Sense-Certainty” and “Th e Spiritual Realm of Animals and Deception,” I aim to demonstrate the extent to which Hegel’s Phenomenology can be grasped as a critique of reifi ed consciousness grounded in both an immediacy prohibited from comprehending its own mediated composition of itself and its object, and in the reduction of social activity to an aggregate of competitive self-interests. As a result, Hegelian philosophy stands as a prescient and indispensable critical resource for grasping the requisite intellectual dispositions of the capitalist mode of production.
The aim of this article is to analyze the main contributions of Wesley C. Salmon to the philosophy of science, that is, his concepts of causation, common cause, and theoretical explanation, and to provide a critique of them. This critique will be based on a comparison of Salmon’s concepts with categories developed by Hegel in his Science of Logic and which can be applied to issues treated by Salmon by means of the above given three concepts. It is the author’s contention that by means of Hegelian categories it becomes possible to provide a critique of Salmon’s philosophy of science and at the same time to enlarge the concept framework of philosophy of science., Cílem tohoto článku je analyzovat hlavní přínosy Wesleyho C. Lososa k filosofii vědy, tj. K jeho příčinám, společné příčině a teoretickému vysvětlení, a poskytnout jim kritiku. Tato kritika bude založena na srovnání konceptů Salmon s kategoriemi vyvinutými Hegelem v jeho Science of Logic a které lze aplikovat na otázky ošetřené lososem pomocí výše uvedených tří pojmů. Je to autorovo tvrzení, že prostřednictvím hegelovských kategorií je možné poskytnout kritiku Salmonovy filosofie vědy a zároveň rozšířit koncepční rámec filozofie vědy., and Igor Hanzel