Hegel’s Foundation Free Metaphysics
The Logic of Singularity
Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy Series

Winner of the hegelpd?prize 2022

Contemporary philosophical discourse has deeply problematized the possibility of absolute existence. Hegel?s Foundation Free Metaphysics demonstrates that by reading Hegel?s Doctrine of the Concept in his Science of Logic as a form of Absolute Dialetheism, Hegel?s logic of the concept can account for the possibility of absolute existence. Through a close examination of Hegel?s concept of self-referential universality in his Science of Logic, Moss demonstrates how Hegel?s concept of singularity is designed to solve a host of metaphysical and epistemic paradoxes central to this problematic. He illustrates how Hegel?s revolutionary account of universality, particularity, and singularity offers solutions to six problems that have plagued the history of Western philosophy: the problem of nihilism, the problem of instantiation, the problem of the missing difference, the problem of absolute empiricism, the problem of onto-theology, and the third man regress. Moss shows that Hegel?s affirmation and development of a revised ontological argument for God?s existence is designed to establish the necessity of absolute existence. By adopting a metaphysical reading of Richard Dien Winfield?s foundation free epistemology, Moss critically engages dominant readings and contemporary debates in Hegel scholarship. Hegel?s Foundation Free Metaphysics will appeal to scholars interested in Hegel, German Idealism, 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and contemporary European thought.

Foreword Richard Dien Winfield

Introduction

Part I: The Problem of Absolute Being

1. The Problem of Nihilism in Early German Idealism

2. The Problem of Emanation in Neo-Platonism

3. Dual Principles of Truth and the Problem of Instantiation

4. The Logic of the Finite Concept

5. The Problem of the Missing Difference and Absolute Empiricism

6. The Problem of Onto-Theology

7. From the the Third Man Regress to Absolute Dialetheism

Part II: Hegel’s Absolute Dialetheism

8. Hegel’s Logic of the Concept: The Concept of Self-Particularization

9. Relative Dialetheism: The No-World View

10. Hegel’s Solution to the Problem of Absolute Knowledge

11. Hegel’s Ontological Argument: The Existence of the Absolute

12. Forms of Ideality in Hegel’s Logic: Being, Essence, and Concept

13. The Logic of Singularity

14. Relativizing the Absolute: Empiricism, Judgment, and Inference

15. The Singular Absolute

Gregory S. Moss has been Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong since 2016. Dr. Moss was a lecturer in philosophy at Clemson University from 2014-2016. Dr. Moss took his PhD in philosophy in August 2014 at the University of Georgia before which he was a Fulbright Fellow (2013-2014) at the University of Bonn.