| My dissertation provides a brief interpretation of Hegel's theory of the will, and then proceeds to reconstruct a defense of that theory against skeptical objections. Hegel's theory of the will revolves around the conditions under which the agent can properly identify with both her motivations and actions. Because Hegel holds that human agents have a rich capacity for self-determination and free will, his position is subject to certain skeptical objections.;Examining potential Hegelian defenses to these objections leads to his Science of Logic, because skepticism about freedom of the will is most plausible when rooted in notions of explanation, necessity, causation, and mechanism. One response is to deny the particular forms of these notions that constitute the premises of the skeptical arguments, and these denials are found in the Logic. I consider three forms of skepticism, based on: (1) the notion that the conditions for the explanation of rational action make free rational action impossible; (2) the intuition that many rational actions are necessary given their circumstances, and Hegel's own view that the rational must be grasped as necessary; and (3) the usefulness of mechanical models for understanding behavior. For each form of skepticism I first reconstruct and defend Hegel's argument for the particular construal of explanation, necessity, and mechanism that he favors. Then I show that the skeptical objections cannot proceed on the basis of Hegel's construal of these notions.;In the Logic's treatment of explanation, Hegel argues that some element of self-explanation is required for any explanation. Once self-explanation is accepted as a constraint on explanation, Hegel's theory of the will can be shown to be explanatory without leading to the vicious infinite regress posited by Galen Strawson's reductio of self-determination. In the Logic's treatment of necessity, Hegel claims that the kind of necessity required for rational comprehension is compatible with alternate possibilities, and this denies the skeptical objection that necessary free action is a self-contradictory notion. In the Logic's treatment of mechanical models, Hegel shows that the internal consistency of those models is parasitic on their contextualization within a teleological model. |
