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Christopher Yeomans, Purdue University
The Temporal Strata of Historical Experience
In this paper, I try to reconstruct the way that concepts, time and history are connected in the thought of G.W.F. Hegel. My starting point is a famous criticism of Hegel’s theory of time by Martin Heidegger, according to which it represents the apotheosis of our everyday,unthinking conception of time as being essentially like space, i.e., a series of nows one right after the other in the same way that space represents a series of points simply next to each other (SZ §82). In reply, I argue that for Hegel, historical experience consists of the interaction of multiple temporal perspectives, each manifesting a distinctive kind of logical perspective. This gives Hegel’s thought a unique perspective on the question of historical progress.