Hegel’s Idea of Philosophy and the World at the End

Abstract

This essay draws to the center the idea of the ‘world’ in Hegel’s philosophy. The impetus for this work is given by the experience of the 2020 Covid pandemic. This is, I suggest, the direct experience of the dialectical nature of the ‘world’, the direct experience of the contradiction in the world from which the idea of the ‘end of the world’ follows. The essay examines Hegel’s new, dialectical cosmology in the aftermath of Kant’s criticism thereof. In particular, I appeal to the distinction between Schulbegriff and Weltbegriff of philosophy in order to place Hegel within the cosmological tradition and make sense of the possibly cosmological notion of an end of the world.