Hegel's Metaphysics of Subjectivity: The Truth of Substance

What is the scope and justification of Hegel’s Science of Logic? What is the meaning of Hegel’s identification of Logic and metaphysics? What relation connects Hegel’s Logic to traditional metaphysics and to Kant’s transcendental philosophy?

Offering a unique and innovative reading of Hegel’s metaphysics, this book provides in-depth and original textual analysis of key passages of Hegel’s Logic. It combines close reading with conceptual and meta-metaphysical awareness of the different notions of “metaphysics” at play in the contemporary landscape, not only to produce a more faithful understanding of what Hegel exactly meant by metaphysics, but also to assess whether Hegel could give a contribution to contemporary debates in realism and in analytic metaphysics. Suggesting that Hegel’s understanding of essence as “absolute negativity” presents the fundamental structure of the absolute understood as “subjectivity,” Elena Tripaldi argues that Hegel’s Logic does not renounce the ambitions of traditional metaphysics, but rather fully realizes them. Moreover, Tripaldi demonstrates that Hegel’s metaphysics consists of a peculiar form of ontological monism, in which the ontological consistency of particulars is not only preserved but exalted.