The Problem of Nature in Hegel's Final System

Reconsiders Hegel's system from the perspective of contemporary philosophy

Wes Furlotte critically evaluates Hegel's philosophy of human freedom in terms of his often-disregarded conception of nature. In doing so, he gives us a new portrait of Hegel's final system that is surprisingly relevant for our contemporary world, connecting it with recent work in speculative realism and new materialism.

Furlotte offers a sophisticated sense of the fundamental materialism permeating Hegel's concept of freedom and how the former serves as the inescapable precondition of subjectivity and social history. He also reveals how material nature and culture's reactions to it problematize human freedom--even threaten it with utter annihilation. This book forces us to reconsider accepted accounts of Hegel's system and to re-evaluate what Hegel, and German Idealism, might still offer us today.

Wes Furlotte is Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College and part-time Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. Specialising in German idealism and 19th- and 20th-century European thought, he has published on problems in ontology, epistemology and socio-political philosophy.