The aim of this special issue is to tackle Hegel’s approach to the constitution of the normative on the basis of natural premises and to investigate his original version of naturalism. In the ambit of the American analytical philosophy, scholars like Sellars, Brandom and McDowell have already pointed out that Hegel’s thought is based on the inferential analysis of the logical and pragmatic elements constituting the mind, reason, self-consciousness and the normative. More recently authors like Terry Pinkard, Michael Thompson and Robert Pippin have highlighted that the Hegelian philosophy leads to the investigation about the natural requisites and premises of the cognitive and intentional stances, pinpointing that a naturalistic method of scrutiny is in play. Hegel’s naturalism is therefore a novel version of naturalism enhancing our understanding of the cognitive, intentional and social human dispositions by addressing their dependence on natural elements like life, desires, instincts and perception. As a naturalist Hegel claims that philosophy deals with natural entities and that the occurrence in human life of non observational entities like mind, cognition, self-consciousness, etc. has to be explained as emerging from and depending on natural requisites that the empirical sciences can directly observe like organic and biological properties. The domain of the normative is, following Hegel, constituted by means of the self-conscious life, namely the capacity to articulate concepts and to constitute a social dimension based on norms and interpersonal interaction. Self-conscious life and the normative, namely the domain of freedom and autonomy, are not explained in his thought as irreducible to and independent from nature understood as the domain of causality, but rather as elements proper of a natural substratum with which they establish a mutual dependence. Briefly illustrated, his naturalism consists in keeping the difference between the normative and nature and, nonetheless, avoiding any sort of dualism or unsolvable contrast between them. The advantage of this approach is explaining these two ambits as reciprocally dependent: self-conscious life does not originate by the separation from nature, but rather by establishing and understanding its own bonds and dependence to nature. In contrast to other more naive versions of naturalism, which separate mind from nature by underlining the former’s emergent character, Hegel’s one maintains that the relation nature-mind is based on the mutual dependence between these two ontogenetic factors of human life and that the cognitive and social dispositions originate from the naturalization of logical and inferential categories of thinking. Consequently, understanding the normative requires a naturalized approach to the cognitive and social aspects constituting what Hegel calls Geist, namely the normative substance subjected to a historic evolution and deployed for explaining the logical structure of human civilization. Finally, this special issue intends to account for the naturalistic premises of normativity in order to extend our understanding of the philosophical category of naturalism and to enhance the comprehension of normativity from a naturalized perspective.

In this contribution I defend the thesis that Hegel's notion of species (Gattung) is not merely the name given to a group of self-reproducing living beings but rather it is at the basis of the Hegelian naturalistic conceptions of self-conscious life, sociality and world history. I maintain that self-reflection and self-referring negativity are the main characteristics of the self-conscious life and they determine the features of both the individual self-consciousness and the entire human species by shaping social practices and world history as acts of actualized freedom. Therefore, the definition of human species goes far beyond the description of its natural features and depends on the fact that self-consciousness is able to determine itself by negating external powers or conditioning. The main argument of this contribution is that human species and its historical evolution can be defined by means of this self-referring negativity and by self-consciousness' capacity to place the external reality under an order of values and concept autonomously yielded.

This paper aims to understand Hegel's claim in the introduction to his Philosophy of Mind that mind is an actualization of the Idea and argues that this claim provides us with a novel and defensible way of understanding Hegel's naturalism. I suggest that Hegel's approach to naturalism should be understood as 'formal', and argue that Hegel's Logic, particularly the section on the 'Idea', provides us with a method for this approach. In the first part of the paper, I present an interpretation of Hegel's method in which life plays a central role. In the second part of the paper, I develop Hegel's method by providing a reading of Hegel's Subjective Spirit, focusing on the sections 'Anthropology' and 'Phenomenology' in particular, arguing that they display the dialectic between life and cognition outlined by Hegel's Idea.

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the central role of the notion of " habit " (Gewohnheit) in Hegel's theory of " embodiment " (Verleiblichung) and to show that the philosophical outcome of the Anthropology is that habit, understood as a sensorimotor life form, is not only an enabling condition for there to be mindedness, but is more strongly an ontological constitutive condition of all its levels of manifestation. Moreover, I will argue that Hegel's approach somehow makes a model of embodied cognition available which offers a unified account of the three main senses of embodiment understood as both a physiological, a functional, and a phenomenological process. In this sense Hegel's approach to habit can make a useful contribution to the contemporary debate on embodiment in philosophy of mind, the cognitive sciences, and action theory. For a long time habit in 20th century philosophy and science has been mostly read in a negative way, identified with mechanical and repetitive routine. The reconstruction of Hegel’s approach is particularly relevant here and can fruitfully contribute to this discussion, since it offers us not only a model that assigns to habit a positive constitutive role in the formation of embodied human mindedness but which also overcomes the dualism between habitual motor routine and intentional activities that is prevalent nowadays in the cognitive sciences and in action theory, and allows for some sense of natural agency as belonging to animal life. Furthermore, Hegel’s approach cuts across the great divide between associationist and holistic approaches to habit that has for a long time dominated the philosophical debate on habit and still shapes the current opposition between classical cognitive science and embodied cognitive science.

The reception of classical American pragmatism by the Frankfurt School began with a critical confrontation with John Dewey. It then left Dewey behind, as Jürgen Habermas, following Karl-Otto Apel, took Charles Sanders Peirce and George Herbert Mead to be philosophers of “communicative Reason.” In recent years, the focus has turned back to Dewey, who is now appreciated as a critical social philosopher in his own right. One reason for the constant confrontation of critical theorists with the works of the pragmatists can be found in their shared intellectual roots. Another one lies in their common orientation towards social transformation. Nevertheless, a serious discussion between pragmatism and critical theory still poses major challenges for those involved today. In what follows, I will first briefly map the common intellectual roots of these two habits of thought (I). Thereafter, I will, a little less briefly, tell the story of the reception of pragmatism in Frankfurt School critical theory as a family drama in five acts (II). At the end, we will find the house still divided; I will then ask why this must be so and whether that is not a philosophically happy ending in that it points to new adventures, which are for us to traverse (III).

A summary of the major themes in the Pittsburgh School (Sellars, McDowell, and Brandom) and its historical significance.

In this Introduction, we aim to give the reader a sense of how McDowell's thought relates to Hegel's. In Sect. 1.1, we consider recent intersections between Hegel's thought and analytic philosophy by briefly reconstructing the growing influence of Hegel within analytic philosophy and by mentioning the main contributions which interpret Hegel's work starting from an analytic conceptual and theoretical framework. In Sect. 1.2, we situate McDowell's work within this landscape: we discuss several papers in which McDowell engages with Hegel's thought, we single out core themes in McDowell's work—perceptual experience, thought and action—, and we show how his treatment of these themes finds echo in Hegel's thought; we also briefly consider McDowell's influence on Hegel-studies. Finally, in Sect. 1.3, we present an outline of the contents of the book by summarizing the various chapters as well as the correspondent replies by McDowell.

In "I that is We, We that is I", an international group of philosophers explore the many facets of Hegel’s formula which expresses the recognitive and social structures of human life. The book offers a guiding thread for the reconstruction of crucial motifs of contemporary thought such as the socio-ontological paradigm; the action-theoretical model in moral and social philosophy; the question of naturalism; and the reassessment of the relevance of work and power for our understanding of human life. This collection addresses the shortcomings of Kantian and constructivist normative approaches to social practices and practical rationality it involves. It sheds new light on Hegel’s take on metaphysics and puts into question some presuppositions of the post-metaphysical interpretative paradigm. With essays by: Fred Neuhouser, Heikki Ikäheimo, Jean-François Kervégan, Luigi Ruggiu, Robert Stern, Arto Laitinen, Francesca Menegoni, Axel Honneth, Lucio Cortella, Luca Illetterati, Emmanuel Renault, Paolo Vinci, Italo Testa, Alfredo Ferrarin, Franco Chiereghin, Leonardo Samonà, Geminello Preterossi