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Rocío Zambrana. Hegel's Theory of Intelligibility. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. x + 183. Cloth, $40.00.
This is a rich and thought-provoking study of Hegel's all-too-often neglected masterpiece, the Science of Logic. Zambrana draws on commentators, such as Robert Pippin, Robert Brandom and Karin de Boer, to construct a highly original and challenging interpretation of the Logic. Her principal thesis is that, for Hegel, our conceptions of nature, self, and society are not simply given to us but are the "product of reason" (119). More precisely, such conceptions, through which we render the world and ourselves intelligible, are norms that have to be authorized by reason within a specific historical context or shape of "spirit." Zambrana's Hegel thus follows Kant in identifying reason as the source of authority in modernity, but he differs from Kant in understanding reason to be irreducibly historical and thus always open to future contestation and revision. He is not, however, a purely historical thinker, for in his Logic he provides an ahistorical demonstration of the necessary historicity of reason (89).
Some commentators, myself included, understand Hegel's logic to be an ontology that discloses the nature of being through examining fundamental categories, such as quality and quantity....