Hugo Havranek

Research Project

Atemporal Dynamism in Hegel's Philosophy of Life

My project focuses on two key topics. The first key topic is Hegel’s account of our knowledge of the natural world. In this account, Hegel responds to recent modern challenges to such knowledge: Hume’s challenge, that we cannot know forces and laws; and Kant’s challenge, that we cannot know living beings. The second key topic is Hegel’s ‘atemporal dynamism’. This is the peculiar feature of his philosophy whereby he talks about his system moving, transitioning, or developing. But this movement, transitioning, or developing, is outside of time. These two key topics are brought together in my main thesis: Hegel argues that we can know the natural world only if we can conceptualize atemporal dynamism.

While in Potsdam, I am working on the final chapter of this project. I look at Hegel’s treatment of ‘Life’ in the ‘Self-consciousness’ chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. I show how Hegel’s account of life is supposed to tackle the Kantian antinomy of teleological judgment—that we cannot come to know living beings, because they are paradoxically self-causing entities. I then show how Hegel thinks that this antinomy can be resolved if we understand life to be structured using atemporal dynamism.