Hegel's Theory of Mental Activity
(Originally copyright Cornell University Press, 1988; Cornell kindly gave me back the copyright when the book went out of print, which change has been duly registered with the Copyright Office. So it is now copyright Willem A. deVries. The files contained here are graphical reproductions of the original text with an invisible text overlay, so they reproduce the look and pagination of the original, but can also be searched using Acrobat's find function. My grateful thanks to Stephen Butterfill for scanning the book and putting it into PDF format.)Contents
Preface xi
A Note on the Texts xvii
The Structure of Subjective Spirit xxi
1 Science,Teleology,and Interpretation 1
Physicalism and Causalism 1
Our Relationship to Nature 4
Two Approaches to Nature 4
Objective Purpose 7
Universal Purpose 10
The Need for Philosophy 13
2 Hegel's Reconception of the Philosophy of Mind 18
Philosophical Psychology: Hegel's Predecessors 18
Against Rational Psychology 19
Against Empiricist Psychology 22
Philosophical Psychology: Hegel's Methodology 24
From Soul to Spirit 25
Subjective Spirit 26
Philosophy and Psychology 28
The Philosophy of Spirit 31
Metaphysics and the Structure of the Sciences 33
The Languages of Nature and Spirit 35
Hegel as a Weak Monist 41
Distinguishing Nature and Spirit 46
Externality and Self-determination 46
The Nature of Spirit 49
4 Sensation: Mind's Material 53
The Sentient and the Nonsentient 54
The Nature of the Animal Organism 55
The Sentient Organism 56
The Object of Sensation 60
Inner and Outer Sense 61
Mediate and Immediate Objects of Sense 63
Sensation as Noncognitive 67
The Role of Feeling 72
Feeling and the Self 74
The Soul's Relation to Reality 78
The Liberation of the Soul 84
6 Phenomenology: The I Emerges 87
Consciousness and the I 89
Does "I" Refer? 90
The Sense of "I" 92
The Reference of "I" 97
The Thinking Subject 99
Universality and Self-relation 99
Thinking as a Subject 104
The Role of Intuition in the Psychology 108
Attention, Space, and Time 111
Intuition Proper 116
8 Representation and Recollection 119
The Role of Representation 119
Recollection 125
9 Imagination: Universality and Signification 135
Associative or Reproductive Imagination 135
Symbolic Imagination 141
Sign-making Imagination 143
10 Memory: Language as the Material of Thought 149
Signification and Language 149
The Stages of Memory 153
Recollective Memory 153
Reproductive Memory 154
Mechanical Memory 157
11 Representing versus Thinking 164
Traditional Accounts of Thought 164
The Classical and Symbolist Theories of Mind 164
Problems with Symbolism 167
Problems with the Classical Theory 169
Problems with Representationalism 170
Hegel's Response to the Traditions 171
The Active Concrete Universal 171
The Rejection of Inspectivism 174
The Immediacy of Thought 176
The Nature of Thought 178
The Formal Structure of Thought 179
Concepts 179
Judgments 180
Inferences 190
The Nature of Thinking Activity 195
The Transition to Practical Spirit 198
Conclusion 200