“Hegel and scepticism” remains an intriguing topic directly concerning the logical and methodological core of Hegel’s system and its formation. Hegel’s thought evolved through his vivid involvement in the vigorous debates over scepticism that took place in Germany around 1800. His strategy did not consist of any fatal immediate confrontation with scepticism. On the contrary, he aimed to immunize philosophy against the threat of scepticism by integrating the latter into the former as its negative and free moment. Hegel’s interpretation of Sextus’ five tropes remains invaluable for his attempt to form a philosophical system that sublates both dogmatism and scepticism.

A series of contributions is unfolding around a keynote paper by Klaus Vieweg – a prominent Hegel scholar who has devoted much of his academic work to the historical and systematic relationship between Hegel and scepticism – which tries to understand and restate the limits and the content of this relationship. Various Hegel readers with different theoretical concerns are dealing with Hegel’s strategy in a large range of areas from logic and epistemology to political philosophy, aesthetics and the history of science.     

• Preface 6
• Contents 8
• Sextus Empiricus als eigentlicher Vater der modernen Philosophie 10
• Hegel’s Critique of Skepticism and the Concept of Determinate Negation 30
• “The dialectic of all that is determinate” 48
• The Conception of Philosophizing 70
• Old and New Scepticism, Old and New Empiricism 90
• Hegel on Scepticism in the Logic of Essence 108
• Faraway, So Close 130
• The Problem of Action in Pyrrhonian Skepticism 142
• Politische Philosophie unter skeptischen Bedingungen 152
• Friedrich Schlegel’s Sceptical Interpretation of Plato 174
• The Reception of Aenesidemus in Fichte and Hegel 194
• Isosthenie in der Praxis 204
• History of Philosophy of Science and Hegel’s Critique of Skepticism 216