International Philosophical Quarterly

Volume 48, Issue 4, December 2008

Truth, Identity, and Correspondence in Hegel’s Critique of Judgment

Hegel, it has been claimed, conceives of truth as material. Such a conception of truth was far from dominant in the nineteenth century, and Hegel’s championing of it might be misinterpreted as indicating a willfully anachronistic, pre-Critical streak in his thought. I argue that this is not the case by exploring a principal motivating factor for Hegel’s position on truth. This factor is a problem concerning the general form of judgment—a problem that, for Hegel, precludes object-based correspondence from functioning as truth. Far from being willfully anachronistic or pre-Critical, Hegel’s conception of truth proves to be intimately linked to and informed by Kant’s Critical project.