Abstract

The dissertation concerns on the notion of thought in Hegelian philosophy, with particular reference to the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1830). More specifically, I have focused on the matter of the "objective thought". The theory of ‘objective thought’ can be characterized as an essential core of the Hegelian philosophy and, at the same time, as one of its most indigestible kernels. This theory, at the intersection of ontological and epistemological problems, on the one hand, is outlined as the particular way in which Hegel solves the problem of the relation between being and thought. On the other hand, it is the result of a powerful conceptual torsion carried out by Hegel on the notion of thought. This torsion consists, in a first approximation, in a strong enlargement of the extension of such a notion, articulated principally in two steps. In the first step, we have an enlargement within the finite subject, inside the mental, through which thought is declined in different ways. In the second step, we have the enlargement of thought to reality in all of its different spheres, natural and spiritual; here, thought, or its determinations, is conceived as its logic-rational structure. Following some recent readings of Hegelian philosophy, I have argued for a non-aprioristic interpretation of this structure, which intends it as essentially opened to transformation: as an immanent structure of the world opened to its transformations. In this perspective, I have underlined the importance of empiric sciences work for Hegelian philosophy. Philosophy would work on the material offered by the scientific disciplines a fit operation of change of categories to insert its results in a more comprehensive context, determined as an holistic system of conceptual determinations. I have held up that to admit a non-aprioristic rational structure of the world means to recognize that the transformation of the world can implicate the transformation of the determinations of its order, and therefore that it must implicate some transformations of the categories turned to its formulation. For this reason I have made reference to the importance of the auto-corrective element of sciences and of the reason in general. Beginning from this reading, I have argued that with the expression "objective thought", Hegel doesn't want to attribute the term “thought” to what is not spiritual, as, for instance, to point at a petrified intelligence in the nature, but to point at a rational form that constitutes the reality and which thought can reach. In other terms, the theory of the objective thought affirm the unity of thought and the objectivity through the form of the rational, form of the rational that the philosophical thought has the task to gather through its own justificatory process