Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Bob Stern was well known and respected around the world for his groundbreaking work on Hegel, Kant, Løgstrup, Peirce and others.He also earned the deep affection of colleagues and students for his great enthusiasm, inexhaustible stamina and good humour in philosophical debate, and his unfailing kindness and generosity towards others.Stern's contribution to Hegel studies was considerable and wide-ranging, covering Hegel's phenomenology and metaphysics, as well as his moral and political philosophy.He published numerous important essays (partly or wholly) on Hegel, as well as the following highly influential books: Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object (1990), Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism (2000), The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit (2013), Hegelian Metaphysics (2009), Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard (2012), Kantian Ethics: Value, Agency, and Obligation (2015), and The Radical Demand in Løgstrup's Ethics (2019).Members of the Hegel Society of Great Britain (HSGB) owe Stern a special debt, as he was a leading figure in the Society for many years.He edited the Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain (now Hegel Bulletin) from 1991 to 1997, and he was President of the HSGB from 2004 to 2011.He co-organized numerous conferences for the HSGB and helped promote the work of a great many young scholars and students.Indeed, he provided practical support and inspiration for more people than he could ever imagine.In this piece, we would like to say a little more about Stern's academic contributions to the study of Hegel and the post-Kantian tradition more broadly.Stern's career began, as noted above, with Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object (1990), a monograph based on the PhD thesis he wrote at Cambridge.In this work, Stern argues that Hegel is a conceptual realist about the structure of objects, and that this takes us beyond Kant, who (in some complicated sense) thought that we bring the structure to objects.This thought that we can move beyond Kant, and draw upon Hegel to do so, was a key theme throughout Stern's work.This theme showed up again in Stern's next monograph, Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism: Answering the Question of Justification (2000).With this work, Stern explicitly turned from metaphysics to epistemology, and carefully explored 1
Source: Hegel Bulletin
Authors: Stephen Houlgate, Joe Saunders
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7129107181