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Looking at contemporary philosophy of mind, one has the impression that philosophers no longer know, nor want to know, nor would find intelligible the desire to know, what the soul is. The soul, it seems, is no longer a legitimate topic for philosophical discourse. It has largely become a form of locution or a linguistic metaphor without philosophical significance, so that it would be inappropriate even to raise the question as to its nature. Rather than being a manifestation of Geist as Hegel would have it, the soul has become somewhat of a ghost. This is unfortunate, because, as I hope to show in what follows, the soul is both a philosophically fascinating as well as a perfectly genuine category in our ontology, at least in the way in which it is analyzed and discussed by Hegel. In particular, it seems that Hegel's categorial explication of the soul has the merit of avoiding both the physicalist reductionism of mind to matter as well as the metaphysical hypostatization of a suprasensible immaterial entity, or so I shall argue. Moreover, Hegel's approach also has the advantage of staying clear of the artificial Cartesian separation of res cogitans from res extensa. In short, I believe that Hegel found a way of saying something both interesting and important about the soul after Kant's decisive critique of rational psychology in the Paralogisms, and without abandoning the topic entirely to empirical psychology.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2614-6_1

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