Introduction

For Jurgen Habermas, and many other contemporary philosophers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's metaphysics has been grouped together with the pre-critical metaphysical doctrines of Western philosophical thought. The reasons for revisiting Hegel's metaphysical and ontological project are perhaps an important concern to address. Hegel's own philosophical project was driven not by academic or technical concerns the philosophy of mind or language; it was instead driven by what he saw to be the cultural crisis of his own time. Following closely on Hartmann's interpretive move, Terry Pinkard argues that we should see Hegel's concept of sociality as the key to his theory of reason and his philosophical system more generally. Hegel's political philosophy holds out for us the promise of an understanding of freedom that has objective and non-relativistic features. The pragmatist's error is to try to view the reflexivity of moral values and moral cognition as features of practices that instantiate a common ethical life.