ABSTRACT
Hegel’s system then is intended to answer a variety of problems and its features can be explained in part by reference to them. One such problem, or nexus of problems, is that of knowledge, the problem of what we can know, whether we can know anything at all, and so on. It is of course only after we have become to some degree reflective and self-conscious that we ask such questions as these. The primary form of the theoretical question is not ‘What can I know (about x)?’ or ‘Can I know whether p is true or not?’ but, ‘What is the case (about x)?’ or ‘Is p true or not?’, and the answers to these questions are assertions about x or of p (or its negation). Why should we ever advance from asking and answering questions about what is the case to asking and answering questions about what we can know? There are several ways in which such questions can arise. We might notice firstly that some of our beliefs must be false, both because different people hold different beliefs and because they subsequently reject beliefs which they once firmly held. What guarantee can there be that any one of our beliefs is true? A natural suggestion is that there might be some test or criterion which we could apply to beliefs in order to distinguish true ones from false ones. But then the doubt occurs that the only way of telling whether a proposed test or criterion is a good one is by seeing whether it in fact picks out all the true, and only the true, beliefs from the false ones, and this implies that we already have some way, independently of this test, of distinguishing them (cf. PG pp. 70 ff., M. pp. 52 ff.).1 A second line of thought which leads to a similarly sceptical conclusion is that characteristically when I claim to know something, I have a reason or a piece of evidence on which I base my belief in the proposition which I claim to know. If we ask about the status of such a reason or premiss, then there seem to be two possible answers: either my acceptance
of this reason or premiss is based upon my acceptance of some further reason or premiss or it is not. In the latter case it is, on Hegel’s view, simply an assumption (Voraussetzung); in the former it seems that either the reason or premiss is supported by some further reason or premiss, and so on to infinity, or, sooner or later, we arrive at reasons or premisses which are simply accepted, without further justification, and are, therefore, mere assumptions.2
