In Friedrich Nietzsche's philologically based "genealogy" of evil, no equivalent of the notion "bose" had been present in the life of an ancient slave-holding society, a society which was clearly meant to be understood as that of the classical Greek polis. The modern conscientious agent manifests the most developed form of moral will. To understand why the stance of the conscientious subject must be taken to be evil requires that will go beyond the narrowly Kantian individualistic standpoint typical of modernity. In Hegel's account in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the treatment of the evil implicit in the moral worldview will lead through the dialectic of the so-called "beautiful soul" into discussions of the religious community. The existence of "evil" in the world has traditionally been seen as posing a problem for religions which, like Christianity, start from the idea of a perfect – omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent – God.

In the 1930s, C. I. Lewis, who was responsible for the revival of modal logic in the era of modern symbolic logic, characterized ‘intensional’ approaches to logic as typical of post-Leibnizian ‘continental philosophy’, in contrast to the ‘extensionalist’ approaches dominant in the British tradition. Indeed Lewis’s own work in this area had been inspired by the logic of his teacher, the American ‘Absolute Idealist’, Josiah Royce. Hegel’s ‘Subjective Logic’ in Book III of hisScience of Logic, can, I suggest, be considered as an intensional modal logic, and this paper explores parallels between it and a later variety of modal logic—tenselogic, as developed by Arthur Prior in the 1950s and 60s. Like Lewis, Prior too had been influenced in this area by a teacher with strong Hegelian leanings—John N. Findlay. Treated as anintensional(with an ‘s’) logic, Hegel’s subjective logic can be used as a framework for addressing issues ofintentionality(with a ‘t’)—the mind’s capacity to be intentionally directed to objects. In this way, I suggest that the structures of his subjective logic can clarify what is at issue in the ‘Psychology’ section of theEncyclopaediaPhilosophy of Subjective Spirit.

Since having been dismissed by Bertrand Russell in the early twentieth century, Hegel has rarely been considered as having views relevant for the core logical and metaphysical concerns of analytic philosophy. According to Russell, Hegel had an antiquated metaphysics that derived from a naïve acceptance of Aristotle’s subject-predicate conception of judgment—an approach that had been made redundant by the revolutionary work in logic by Frege. However, the grounds invoked by Russell for Hegel’s excommunication came into question when philosophers and logicians reengaged with modal issues from the 1960s. For example, Aristotle once again came to be taken seriously by those anxious to avoid what they saw as the unwanted metaphysical consequences of Russellian extensionalism in logic when applied to modal logic. Hegel’s views, however, have never been reexamined in a similar way. In this paper, I argue that in his account of judgment in his Science of Logic, Hegel offers an approach that is very different to that portrayed by Russell. In particular, it is an approach that offers novel ways of thinking about puzzling issues concerning the logical treatment of tense and modality—topics that have become central to mainstream debates.

We reconstruct Hegel's implicit version of the ontological argument in the light of his anti-representationalist idealist metaphysics. For Hegel, the ontological argument had been a peculiarly modern form of argument for the existence of God, presupposing a ‘representationalist’ account of the mind and its concepts. As such, it was susceptible to Kant's famous refutation, but Kant himself had provided a model for an alternative conception ofconcept, one developed by Fichte with his notion of the I=I. We reconstruct an Hegelian version of the ontological argument by considering the possibility of aFichteanversion, and then subjectingitto a critique based on Hegel's critical appropriation of Fichte's I=I.

Here, I pursue consequences, for the interpretation of Sellars’ critique of the ‘Myth of the Given’, of separating the modal significance that Kant attributed to empirical intuition from the epistemological role it also played for him. It is argued that Kant’s approach to modality in the Critique of Pure Reason can best be understood as a transcendental variation on Leibniz’s earlier ‘possibilist’ approach that treated the actual world as just one of a variety of possible alternative worlds. In this context, empirical intuitions seem to work like the mythical Givens subject to Sellars’ critique. This Kantian possibilism is then contrasted with an ‘actualist’ alternative approach to modality found in the contemporary work of Robert Stalnaker, but also recognizable in Hegel. In particular, the role of immediate perceptual judgments in Hegel is likened to that played by ‘witness statements’ in Robert Stalnaker’s attempt to distinguish the logic of judgments about the actual world from those about its alternate possibilities.