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Mark Alznauer

Assistant Professor

Office: Crowe 3-167

E-mail: m-alznauer@northwestern.edu

Phone: 847-491-2559

Ph.D. University of Chicago (2008). Mark Alznauer specializes in ethics and social theory in nineteenth century German philosophy. He also has interests in the history of political philosophy and the theory of action. He is currently working on a book-length study of Hegel’s theory of responsibility.   

CURRENT CV

Work

• “Ethics and History in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy”, The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. LXVI, No. 251, March 2012 (forthcoming)

Abstract:  Hegel’s contextualization of ethics in history has often been understood as implying the possibility of “world-historical” justifications for unethical actions.  Critics have seen this as a category mistake that violates the authority of the ethical sphere; defenders have argued that it represents one of Hegel’s most revolutionary insights, the idea that customary morality should not stand in the way of human liberation.  In this essay, I argue that both of these reactions are based on failure to properly distinguish between rational justification and contextual justification. Properly understood, Hegel’s practical philosophy is restricted to the former task; the authority to determine whether norms are binding in any given circumstance is retained by context-sensitive ethical judgment.

• “Hegel on Legal and Moral Responsibility”, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 51, No. 4, August 2008.

Abstract:  When Hegel first addresses moral responsibility in the Philosophy of Righthe presupposes that agents are only responsible for what they intended to do, but appears to offer little, if any, justification for this assumption.  In this essay, I claim that the first part of the Philosophy of Right, “Abstract Right”, contains an implicit argument that legal or external responsibility (blame for what we have done) is conceptually dependent on moral responsibility proper (blame for what we have intended).  This overlooked argument satisfies the first half of a thesis Hegel applies to action in the Encyclopedia Logic, namely, that the outer must be inner, and thus provides a necessary complement for his more explicit treatment of the second half of that thesis, that the inner must be outer.  The claim that agents are only responsible for what they intended to do might appear to risk conflating legal and moral responsibility and to lack the necessary means to deal with the phenomenon of moral luck, but I argue that properly situated within the whole of Hegel’s philosophy of action it can be saved from both of these consequences and so take its place as an essential component of Hegel’s full theory of moral responsibility.

 

Work in Progress

• “Hegel’s Typology of Justificatory Reasons.” 

Abstract: In this article, I offer a new interpretation of the basic structure of Hegel’s theory of action. I.) First, I show that Hegel’s basic concept of action is more peculiar than it has been taken to be by recent commentators.  He understands action in the proper sense (Handlung) not simply as the subcategory of events that are done for reasons (as Michael Quante has argued), but as the subcategory of events done for reasons which make an tacit claim to be rationally justified.  II.) Second, I show both that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right posits four distinguishable categories of rational justification (or, in his terminology, “spheres of right”) and show how each of these point to different aspects or dimensions of action.  III.) Third, I show how Hegel organizes these four modes of justification into a hierarchy that respects their independence from each other without generating irreconcilable conflicts between them.

• “Is ‘Morality’ Hegel’s Philosophy of Action?”

Abstract: There are two related questions that must be resolved in order to determine the significance of Hegel’s discussion of action in the ‘Morality’ section of the Philosophy of Right for contemporary debates in the philosophy of action.  First, does Hegel’s Tat/Handlung distinction imply anything about the action/event distinction?  Second, is Hegel’s philosophy of action separable from his theory of legal and moral responsibility?  My central interpretive claim in this essay is that although the Tat/Handlung can be understood as a crucial part of Hegel’s philosophy of action, his philosophy of action cannot be separated from his treatment of legal and moral responsibility.  I argue that this inseparability does not represent an oversight or defect in Hegel’s treatment of action; rather it signals a principled divergence from merely psychological approaches to action like Davidson’s which (on the Hegelian view) wrongly abstract away from the social and normative context in which actions necessarily take place.  In particular, I show that Hegel is committed to the striking view that action proper is only possible in a constitutional state.

• “Kierkegaard’s Critique of Hegel’s Inner-Outer Thesis”

Abstract:  In Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Johannes Climacus criticizes Hegel for lacking an ethics, tracing this failure to the mistaken thesis that “the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer.”  Jon Stewart has recently argued that Kierkegaard’s criticisms of the inner-outer thesis are actually directed at Heiberg not Hegel and that they imply no substantive philosophic disagreement with Hegel.  This essay argues to the contrary, showing that Kierkegaard’s criticisms of the inner-outer thesis involve a substantial critique and modification of Hegel’s theory of responsible agency.  Once this disagreement is fully articulated, it can be seen as the philosophic underpinning of Hegel and Kierkegaard’s radically different conceptions of the ethical task of philosophy.

 

"Hegel and Kierkegaard on the Inner/Outer Problem."  Please do not cite without permission.

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