Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2014
Whether freedom and causal necessity can coexist in the same world remains a contested question. In this article, I seek to show that Hegel's analysis of the category of causality, which concludes in the transition from the logic of essence to the logic of the concept, can help to elucidate this question itself. Starting with a short characterization of the positions in Kant's account of the ‘antinomy of freedom’ in his Critique of Pure Reason, I reconstruct the main sections of Hegel's account of causality in his Science of Logic. Holding the two accounts together shows that both proponent and opponent in the ‘antinomy of freedom’ are misled in that there are not two different kinds of causality at issue but rather two intrinsically connected moments of causality as such.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain at St Edmund Hall, Oxford in September 2013. I am very grateful to the president of HSGB, Stephen Houlgate, to the participants of the conference for highly instructive discussions, and especially to the editor of the Hegel Bulletin, Katerina Deligiorgi, for her extremely helpful suggestions and comments.