Hegel’s Speculation as an Answer to Plato’s Dialectics

Tereza Matějčková

The article focuses on Hegel’s conception of dialectics against the background of Plato’s The Sophist. Hegel radicalizes Plato’s doctrine of the highest genera by understanding unity exclusively as related to alterity. Instead of being tied to perspectives, this relation is ontologically grounded – unity is constituted through difference. This dynamic conception of being is then understood against the background of Hegel’s Phenomenology: any being is only insofar as it appears; and as appearing it is essentially a relation of sameness and alterity. Rather than a monistic philosopher, Hegel is to be understood as a thinker of the ontological link between unity and difference.