PHILOSOPHICAL WORLD HISTORIES AND DEONTOLOGICAL ETHICS

Abstract

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel characterised universal history makers as seeking out the connecting ‘internal guiding soul of events and actions’. Explicitly reasoning about the ‘guiding soul’, framework or logic of history denotes the work of the philosophical historian. Hegel offered a more detailed account than Kant of the history of humanity. The conversion of Constantine ushered in ‘religious self-consciousness’ and important questions about the nature and limits of human existence. The realisation of eternal consciousness is for Green simultaneously individual, social and human. Hegel thought about the role of nature in history and in history making. Immanuel Kant is the thinker most commonly associated with deontological ethics. Across his works, Kant argued for the recognition of the power of human reason and judgement in discerning our duty to the highest good. Kant also identified the driver for humanity’s understanding of ethics: its unsociable sociability.