Paul Redding
The University of Sydney, Philosophy, Emeritus
- I work mainly in the areas of Hegelian philosophy and the tradition of continental idealism more generally. In partic... moreI work mainly in the areas of Hegelian philosophy and the tradition of continental idealism more generally. In particular I'm interested in the relationship of this tradition to the later movements of analytic philosophy and pragmatism as well as both ancient and modern mathematics and logic. My most recent research has been concerned with Hegel's attempts to revitalise classical logic which he believed to have its roots in Plato's appropriation of Pythagorean musical theory. I am a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, past honorary president of the Hegel Society of Australia and past president of the Australasian Association of Philosophy.edit
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Conceptual Harmonies develops an original account of G. W. F. Hegel’s perplexing Science of Logic from a simple insight: philosophical and mathematical thought have shaped each other since classical times. Situating the Science of Logic... more
Conceptual Harmonies develops an original account of G. W. F. Hegel’s perplexing Science of Logic from a simple insight: philosophical and mathematical thought have shaped each other since classical times. Situating the Science of Logic within the rise of modern mathematics, Redding stresses Hegel’s attention to Pythagorean ratios, Platonic reason, and Aristotle’s geometrically inspired logic. He then explores how later traditions shaped Hegel’s world, through both Leibniz and new forms of algebraic geometry. This enlightening reading recovers an overlooked stream in Hegel’s philosophy that remains, Redding argues, important for contemporary conceptions of logic.
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An advance on recent revisionist thinking about Hegelian philosophy, this book interprets Hegel’s achievement as part of a revolutionary modernization of ancient philosophical thought initiated by Kant. In particular, Paul Redding argues... more
An advance on recent revisionist thinking about Hegelian philosophy, this book interprets Hegel’s achievement as part of a revolutionary modernization of ancient philosophical thought initiated by Kant. In particular, Paul Redding argues that Hegel’s use of hermeneutics, an emerging way of thinking objectively about intentional human subjects, overcame the major obstacle encountered by Kant in his attempt to modernize philosophy. The result was the first genuinely modern, hermeneutic, and “nonmetaphysical” philosophy.
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Most attempts to trace the roots of current scientific approaches to the mind have ignored the contributions of post-Kantian German idealism. Paul Redding here shows the relevance of this philosophical tradition to an understanding of the... more
Most attempts to trace the roots of current scientific approaches to the mind have ignored the contributions of post-Kantian German idealism. Paul Redding here shows the relevance of this philosophical tradition to an understanding of the mind and its embodiment as well as the relation of feeling to cognition.
Most attempts to trace the roots of current scientific approaches to the mind have ignored the contributions of post-Kantian German idealism. Paul Redding here shows the relevance of this philosophical tradition to an understanding of the... more
Most attempts to trace the roots of current scientific approaches to the mind have ignored the contributions of post-Kantian German idealism. Paul Redding here shows the relevance of this philosophical tradition to an understanding of the mind and its embodiment as well as the relation of feeling to cognition.
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Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess philosophers after him in light of their responses to Kantian idealism. In Continental Idealism, Paul Redding argues that the story of German... more
Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess philosophers after him in light of their responses to Kantian idealism. In Continental Idealism, Paul Redding argues that the story of German idealism begins with Leibniz.
Redding begins by examining Leibniz’s dispute with Newton over the nature of space, time and God, and stresses the way in which Leibniz had incorporated Platonic and Aristotelian elements into his distinctive brand of idealism. Redding shows how Kant’s interpretation of Leibniz’s views of space and time consequently shaped his own “transcendental” version of idealism. Redding then argues that the idealisms of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, on the one hand, and metaphysical sceptics such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, on the other, continued to wrestle with a form of idealism ultimately derived from Leibniz.
Redding begins by examining Leibniz’s dispute with Newton over the nature of space, time and God, and stresses the way in which Leibniz had incorporated Platonic and Aristotelian elements into his distinctive brand of idealism. Redding shows how Kant’s interpretation of Leibniz’s views of space and time consequently shaped his own “transcendental” version of idealism. Redding then argues that the idealisms of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, on the one hand, and metaphysical sceptics such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, on the other, continued to wrestle with a form of idealism ultimately derived from Leibniz.
BLURB: Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess philosophers after him in light of their responses to Kantian idealism. In Continental Idealism, Paul Redding argues that the story of... more
BLURB: Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess philosophers after him in light of their responses to Kantian idealism. In Continental Idealism, Paul Redding argues that the story of German idealism begins with Leibniz.
Redding begins by examining Leibniz’s dispute with Newton over the nature of space, time and God, and stresses the way in which Leibniz had incorporated Platonic and Aristotelian elements into his distinctive brand of idealism. Redding shows how Kant’s interpretation of Leibniz’s views of space and time consequently shaped his own “transcendental” version of idealism. Redding then argues that the idealisms of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, on the one hand, and metaphysical sceptics such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, on the other, continued to wrestle with a form of idealism ultimately derived from Leibniz.
Continental Idealism offers not only a new picture of one of the most important philosophical movements in the history of philosophy, but also a valuable and clear introduction to the origins of Continental and European philosophy.
Redding begins by examining Leibniz’s dispute with Newton over the nature of space, time and God, and stresses the way in which Leibniz had incorporated Platonic and Aristotelian elements into his distinctive brand of idealism. Redding shows how Kant’s interpretation of Leibniz’s views of space and time consequently shaped his own “transcendental” version of idealism. Redding then argues that the idealisms of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, on the one hand, and metaphysical sceptics such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, on the other, continued to wrestle with a form of idealism ultimately derived from Leibniz.
Continental Idealism offers not only a new picture of one of the most important philosophical movements in the history of philosophy, but also a valuable and clear introduction to the origins of Continental and European philosophy.
After a period of neglect, the idealist and romantic philosophies that emerged in the wake of Kant’s revolutionary writings have once more become important foci of philosophical interest, especially in relation to the question of the role... more
After a period of neglect, the idealist and romantic philosophies that emerged in the wake of Kant’s revolutionary writings have once more become important foci of philosophical interest, especially in relation to the question of the role of religion in human life. By developing and reinterpreting basic Kantian ideas, an array of thinkers including Schelling, Hegel, Friedrich Schlegel, Hölderlin and Novalis transformed the conceptual framework within which the nature of religion could be considered. Furthermore, in doing so they significantly shaped the philosophical perspectives from within which later thinkers such as Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Wagner and Nietzsche could re-pose the question of religion. This volume explores the spaces opened during this extended period of post-Kantian thinking for a reconsideration of the place of religion within the project of human self-fashioning.
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This book examines the possibilities for the rehabilitation of Hegelian thought within current analytic philosophy. From its inception, the analytic tradition has in general accepted Bertrand Russell's hostile dismissal of the idealists,... more
This book examines the possibilities for the rehabilitation of Hegelian thought within current analytic philosophy. From its inception, the analytic tradition has in general accepted Bertrand Russell's hostile dismissal of the idealists, based on the claim that their metaphysical views were irretrievably corrupted by the faulty logic that informed them. But these assumptions are challenged by the work of such analytic philosophers as John McDowell and Robert Brandom, who while contributing to core areas of the analytic movement, nevertheless have found in Hegel sophisticated ideas that are able to address problems which still haunt the analytic tradition after a hundred years. Paul Redding traces the consequences of the displacement of the logic presupposed by Kant and Hegel by modern post-Fregean logic, and examines the developments within twentieth-century analytic philosophy which have made possible an analytic re-engagement with a previously dismissed philosophical tradition.
Thoughts, Deeds, Words and World examines key features of Hegel’s philosophy as giving expression to a response—both idealist and systematic—to the so-called “metacritical” attack on Kant’s revolutionary form of idealism. This... more
Thoughts, Deeds, Words and World examines key features of Hegel’s philosophy as giving expression to a response—both idealist and systematic—to the so-called “metacritical” attack on Kant’s revolutionary form of idealism. This metacritical attack, which appeared in the late 18th century in different forms in works by J. G. Hamann and his follower J. G. von Herder, was based on the thesis that language was, in Hamann’s words, “the only, first, and last organon and criterion of reason, with no credentials but tradition and usage”. This style of thesis, stressing the dependency of thought on the conventions of language, has been echoed in more recent times by similarly conceived attacks on systematic philosophy.
Thoughts, Deeds, Words and World examines key features of Hegel’s philosophy as giving expression to a response—both idealist and systematic—to the so-called “metacritical” attack on Kant’s revolutionary form of idealism. This... more
Thoughts, Deeds, Words and World examines key features of Hegel’s philosophy as giving expression to a response—both idealist and systematic—to the so-called “metacritical” attack on Kant’s revolutionary form of idealism. This metacritical attack, which appeared in the late 18th century in different forms in works by J. G. Hamann and his follower J. G. von Herder, was based on the thesis that language was, in Hamann’s words, “the only, first, and last organon and criterion of reason, with no credentials but tradition and usage”. This style of thesis, stressing the dependency of thought on the conventions of language, has been echoed in more recent times by similarly conceived attacks on systematic philosophy.
In this paper, I approach Hegel’s philosophy under the banner of a “Keplerian Revolution”, the implicit reference being, of course, to Kant’s supposed Copernican philosophical revolution. Kepler had been an early supporter of the... more
In this paper, I approach Hegel’s philosophy under the banner of a “Keplerian Revolution”, the implicit reference being, of course, to Kant’s supposed Copernican philosophical revolution. Kepler had been an early supporter of the Copernican paradigm in astronomy, but went well beyond
his predecessor, and so is invoked here in an attempt to capture some of the important ways in which Hegel attempted to go beyond the philosophy of Kant. To make these issues more determinate, however, Hegel’s Keplerian orientation will not be presented in its contrast to Kant’s “Copernicanism” as such, but as contrasted with that of another early follower of Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and this Brunian orientation will be used to characterize Kant’s philosophy as seen from Hegel’s rival
Keplerian point of view. Interpreting Hegel as a philosophical Keplerian will require that we broach those worrisome aspects of Kepler’s astronomy, namely his support for Plato’s cosmology and the tradition of the “music of the spheres”, but this will be shown to have connections to Hegel’s own
approach to logic. This in turn will help shed light on the meaning of Hegel’s form of idealism and, in particular, on its usually unacknowledged Platonic dimensions
his predecessor, and so is invoked here in an attempt to capture some of the important ways in which Hegel attempted to go beyond the philosophy of Kant. To make these issues more determinate, however, Hegel’s Keplerian orientation will not be presented in its contrast to Kant’s “Copernicanism” as such, but as contrasted with that of another early follower of Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and this Brunian orientation will be used to characterize Kant’s philosophy as seen from Hegel’s rival
Keplerian point of view. Interpreting Hegel as a philosophical Keplerian will require that we broach those worrisome aspects of Kepler’s astronomy, namely his support for Plato’s cosmology and the tradition of the “music of the spheres”, but this will be shown to have connections to Hegel’s own
approach to logic. This in turn will help shed light on the meaning of Hegel’s form of idealism and, in particular, on its usually unacknowledged Platonic dimensions
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In this paper I return to the familiar territory of the Lord-Bondsman "dialectic" in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in order to raise the question of the relation of Hegel's use of the theme of recognition there to Fichte's. Fichte had... more
In this paper I return to the familiar territory of the Lord-Bondsman "dialectic" in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in order to raise the question of the relation of Hegel's use of the theme of recognition there to Fichte's. Fichte had introduced the notion of recognition in his Foundations of Natural Right, to "deduce" the social existence of humans within relations of mutual recognition as a necessary condition of their very self-consciousness. However, there it also functioned as part of a solution to a problem within the work on which the theory of rights was meant to be based, the earlier Foundation of the Complete Wissenschaftslehre of 1794-5. In Hegel's classic account in chapter 4 of the Phenomenology we find recognition offered as a solution to a problem within an account of "selfconsciousness" that has a number of clearly Fichtean features. But I suggest that to the degree that the lord-bondsman episode there expresses any "theory of recognition", it is not Hegel’s own theory but rather his interpretation of Fichte's, a theory of which he is critical. Freed from this misleading assumption that the "lord-bondsman dialectic" represents something deep about Hegel's own philosophy, we might then be more able to get clearer about Hegel's actual views about recognition and the role it plays in his own philosophy.
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Recently, historians have discussed the relevance of the nineteenth-century mathematical discipline of projective geometry for early modern classical logic in relation to possible solutions to semantic problems facing it. In this paper, I... more
Recently, historians have discussed the relevance of the nineteenth-century mathematical discipline of projective geometry for early modern classical logic in relation to possible solutions to semantic problems facing it. In this paper, I consider Hegel’s Science of Logic as an attempt to provide a projective geometrical alternative to the implicit Euclidean underpinnings of Aristotle’s syllogistic logic. While this proceeds via Hegel’s acceptance of the role of the three means of Pythagorean music theory in Plato’s cosmology, the relevance of this can be separated from any fanciful “music of the spheres” approach by the fact that common mathematical structures underpin both music theory and projective geometry, as suggested in the name of projective geometry’s principal invariant, the “harmonic cross-ratio”. Here, I demonstrate this common structure in terms of the phenomenon of “inverse foreshortening”. As with recent suggestions concerning the relevance of projective geometry for logic, Hegel’s modifications of Aristotle respond to semantic problems of his logic.
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Hegel interpreters commonly reject attempts to situate Hegel’s logic in relation to modern movements. Appealing to his criticisms of the logic of Verstand or mere understanding with its fixed logical structure, Hegel’s logic, it is... more
Hegel interpreters commonly reject attempts to situate Hegel’s logic
in relation to modern movements. Appealing to his criticisms of the
logic of Verstand or mere understanding with its fixed logical structure, Hegel’s logic, it is pointed out, was a logic of Vernunft or reason—a logic more at home in the thought of Plato and Aristotle than
in modern mathematical forms. Contesting this implied dichotomy,
it is here argued that the ancient roots of Hegel’s logic, especially
as transmitted by late Neopythagorean/Neoplatonic thinkers such
as Proclus, gave it many features similar to ones later found in the
type of algebraic transformation of Aristotle, started first by Leibniz, reanimated by Boole in the mid-nineteenth century and then
developed by others such as C. S. Peirce and Arend Heyting. In particular, the ancient mathematics upon which Hegel had drawn allowed
him to anticipate an answer to the criticism that Frege would later
aim at Boole, concerning his inability to unite opposed class and
propositional calculi. Hegel’s logic would be a hybrid, incorporating
features found later in intuitionist and classical logic, but it could be
so because of the way he had called upon the mathematics of the
ancient Platonist tradition
in relation to modern movements. Appealing to his criticisms of the
logic of Verstand or mere understanding with its fixed logical structure, Hegel’s logic, it is pointed out, was a logic of Vernunft or reason—a logic more at home in the thought of Plato and Aristotle than
in modern mathematical forms. Contesting this implied dichotomy,
it is here argued that the ancient roots of Hegel’s logic, especially
as transmitted by late Neopythagorean/Neoplatonic thinkers such
as Proclus, gave it many features similar to ones later found in the
type of algebraic transformation of Aristotle, started first by Leibniz, reanimated by Boole in the mid-nineteenth century and then
developed by others such as C. S. Peirce and Arend Heyting. In particular, the ancient mathematics upon which Hegel had drawn allowed
him to anticipate an answer to the criticism that Frege would later
aim at Boole, concerning his inability to unite opposed class and
propositional calculi. Hegel’s logic would be a hybrid, incorporating
features found later in intuitionist and classical logic, but it could be
so because of the way he had called upon the mathematics of the
ancient Platonist tradition
This article examines a convergence between approaches to practical reason in the logics of Aristotle, Hegel and Peirce around a form of non-demonstrative inference that proceeds in a regressive way from conclusions to premises of a... more
This article examines a convergence between approaches to practical reason in the logics of Aristotle, Hegel and Peirce around a form of non-demonstrative inference that proceeds in a regressive way from conclusions to premises of a deductive inference. In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle had described a type of practical deliberation in this way and had likened it to a type of inference used by geometers in relation to their constructed diagrams. Peirce would describe a similar form of inference he called “abduction”, and parallels between Peirce’s three inference forms—deduction, induction, and abduction—are found in Hegel’s treatment of the three figures of Aristotle’s syllogism in Book III of The Science of Logic. It is argued that this postulation of a third inference form in Aristotle coheres with Hegel’s Platonic reconstruction of Aristotle’s formal syllogistic and his related separation of the categories of singularity and particularity.
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While in his Science of Logic, Hegel employed neither diagrams nor formulae, his reinterpretation of Aristotle’s syllogistic logic in the “Subjective Logic” of Book III strongly suggests a diagrammatic dimension. Significantly, an early... more
While in his Science of Logic, Hegel employed neither diagrams nor formulae, his reinterpretation of Aristotle’s syllogistic logic in the “Subjective Logic” of Book III strongly suggests a diagrammatic dimension. Significantly, an early diagram depicting a “triangle of triangles” found among his papers after his death captures the organization of categories to be found in The Science of Logic. Features of this diagram help us understand Hegel’s logical project as an attempt to retrieve features of Plato’s thinking that are implicit within Aristotle’s syllogistic logic. It is argued that parallels between Hegel’s modification of Aristotle’s syllogistic figures and Peirce’s functional alignment of those syllogistic figures with his three inference forms—deduction, induction, and abduction—suggest modifications of the traditional “square of opposition” into a logical hexagon as found in recent discussions. However, Hegel had conceived of Aristotle’s syllogism as a distorted version of the “syllogism” thought by Plato to bind the parts of the cosmos into a unity as described in the dialogue Timaeus. In accord with this, it is argued that seen in the light of Hegel’s platonistic reconstruction of Aristotle’s logic, such logical hexagons should be understood as two-dimensional projections of a logical polyhedron.
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This paper gives a brief sketch of Gyo¨rgy Markus’s philosophical style as manifest in the context of his role within the revival of Hegelian philosophy in Sydney in the last decades of the 20th century. Written from the perspective of... more
This paper gives a brief sketch of Gyo¨rgy Markus’s philosophical style as manifest in the
context of his role within the revival of Hegelian philosophy in Sydney in the last decades
of the 20th century. Written from the perspective of one of his students, this style is
sharpened by the contrast with that of another philosopher who was influential in the
Hegel revival around that time, Richard Rorty. It is suggested that the stark antithesis
between Markusian and Rortarian philosophical and interpretative styles reflects ten- ´
sions within Hegel’s own attitude to what it might mean to reanimate a philosophy from
the past within a radically changed cultural context
context of his role within the revival of Hegelian philosophy in Sydney in the last decades
of the 20th century. Written from the perspective of one of his students, this style is
sharpened by the contrast with that of another philosopher who was influential in the
Hegel revival around that time, Richard Rorty. It is suggested that the stark antithesis
between Markusian and Rortarian philosophical and interpretative styles reflects ten- ´
sions within Hegel’s own attitude to what it might mean to reanimate a philosophy from
the past within a radically changed cultural context
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This is an introductory essay to Australiasian Philosophical Review, vol. 2, number 2, devoted to the Hegel interpretation of Robert Pippin.
Research Interests: Hegel and Robert Pippin
Here I argue for a particular interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics and against two rival interpretations. The interpretations I argue against are those that portray him on the one hand as a kind of naturalist or, on the other, as a type... more
Here I argue for a particular interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics and against two rival interpretations. The interpretations I argue against are those that portray him on the one hand as a kind of naturalist or, on the other, as a type of conceptual realist, or as some combination of both. The account I will argue for I call an “actualist” one, and it is an account motived by the same sorts of concern that I take to be behind the approaches of the naturalist and the conceptual realist—an attempt to construe Hegel in broadly “modern” terms that rejects extravagant ontological commitments to anything supernatural and that aims to somehow reconcile what Wilfrid Sellars described as the “manifest” view we have of ourselves and our place in the world with the modern scientific world-view. The actualist account avoids problems facing its rivals. In contrast the naturalist who has to find a place in nature for Hegel’s Geist, the actualist conceives the actual world as conceiving minds from the start, but in contrast to the conceptual realist, the world for the actualist can contain minds without presupposing any supernaturalist assumptions. Details of Hegel’s subjective logic are called upon to support the actualist reading of his metaphysics.
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Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit provides a fascinating picture of individual minds caught up in relations so as to constitute a realm—“spirit”—which, while necessarily embedded in nature, is not reducible to it. Hegel’s “real”... more
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit provides a fascinating picture of individual minds caught up in relations so as to constitute a realm—“spirit”—which, while necessarily embedded in nature, is not reducible to it. Hegel’s “real” philosophies of nature and spirit are meant to be based on the logical structures of his Science of Logic, and I suggest a way of understanding this in the context to his psychology. As with idealist logics in general, Hegel’s was meant to be understood “intensionally” rather than “extensionally”, and as Arthur Prior once suggested, the intentional (with a “t”) contents of psychology might be understood in terms of the intensional (with an “s”) relations of logic. Here I draw on Hegel’s “subjective logic”, understood in the light of modern modal logic, in an attempt to model the way minds might be thought as connected by way of shared intentional contents. Here, we should not be surprised at some of the parallels that emerge between the approaches of Hegel and Prior, as Prior had testified to the influence of his teacher, John N. Findlay, who himself had strong Hegelian leanings. In the final section, Robert Stalnaker’s version of possible-world semantics is suggested as a framework within which Hegel’s recognitive account of the mind might be understood.
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Here, I pursue consequences, for the interpretation of Sellars’s critique of the “Myth of the Given”, of separating the modal significance that Kant attributed to empirical intuition from the epistemological role it also played for him.... more
Here, I pursue consequences, for the interpretation of Sellars’s critique of the “Myth of the Given”, of separating the modal significance that Kant attributed to empirical intuition from the epistemological role it also played for him. It is argued that Kant’s approach to modality in the Critique of Pure Reason can best be understood as a transcendental variation on Leibniz’s earlier “possibilist” approach that treated the actual world (for Kant understood as the world of objective appearance) as just one of a variety of possible alternative worlds. In this context, empirical intuitions seem to work like the mythical Given’s subject to Sellars’s critique. This Kantian possibilism is then contrasted with an “actualist” alternative approach to modality found in the contemporary work of Robert Stalnaker, but also recognizable in Hegel. In particular, the role of immediate perceptual judgments in Hegel is likened to that played by “witness statements” in Robert Stalnaker’s attempt to distinguish the logic of judgments about the actual world from those about its alternate possibilities. I then introduce the idea of a “logical dualism” running through Hegel’s account of judgment that enables a systematic modal distinction like that found in Stalnaker.
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Interpreters disagree over whether the categories or “thought determinations” of Hegel’s Objective Logic should be construed as, following Aristotle, fundamentally about being, or, following Kant, fundamentally about thought. Moreover,... more
Interpreters disagree over whether the categories or “thought determinations” of Hegel’s Objective Logic should be construed as, following Aristotle, fundamentally about being, or, following Kant, fundamentally about thought. Moreover, they disagree over the relation that Objective Logic stands to Subjective Logic, which inturn involves its own transition to “objectivity”.
This paper focuses on Hegel’s Subjective Logic as charting a process in which a logic initially understood as subjective and formal, after the manner of Kant, comes to acquire content, issuing in a type of unity of thought and being of which the earlier Objective Logic was incapable. In particular, Hegel’s account of judgment and syllogism can be read as a critical reinterpretation of the logic governing the passage from experience to “ideas” in Aristotle’s account of epagoge or “induction”.
This paper focuses on Hegel’s Subjective Logic as charting a process in which a logic initially understood as subjective and formal, after the manner of Kant, comes to acquire content, issuing in a type of unity of thought and being of which the earlier Objective Logic was incapable. In particular, Hegel’s account of judgment and syllogism can be read as a critical reinterpretation of the logic governing the passage from experience to “ideas” in Aristotle’s account of epagoge or “induction”.
In her latest book Danielle Macbeth has embarked on a project that, in its ambitious attempt to chart the realization of reason in an historical process running from the Greeks to the present, can be compared to Hegel's. For her, the key... more
In her latest book Danielle Macbeth has embarked on a project that, in its ambitious attempt to chart the realization of reason in an historical process running from the Greeks to the present, can be compared to Hegel's. For her, the key philosophical figure in this narrative is the logician Gottlob Frege, and although Frege is usually thought of as the thinker behind the emergence of analytic philosophy, Macbeth's Frege is dissociated from that context, and portrayed as instantiating the final phase in her Hegelian narrative—pure reason as a power of knowing. Here Macbeth's and Hegel's projects are compared, and a non-traditional interpretation of Hegel's concept of metaphysical knowledge is invoked in an effort to sharpen what Macbeth might actually mean by her conception of pure reason as a power of knowing. Danielle Macbeth's Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing is, as its title and subtitle suggest, a book of very ambitious scope: it sets out a philosophical account of the realization of reason from the Greeks to the present. Philosophically considered, the idea of the realization of reason, of course, means more than simply the accumulation of knowledge. Here it means the historical development and explication of publically assessable rational practices that can be considered as the infrastructure responsible for the attainment of such knowledge. Macbeth accepts the idea that it was the development of natural language that allowed our species to move beyond mere animal existence, making possible a type of rational life beyond the realm of organic life in a way parallel to that in which the development of organic life went beyond the merely physical and chemical processes preceding it. But particular symbolic and, importantly, written, extensions of natural language have been part of the process of allowing reason to reflect and work upon, and so transform its own
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The second half of the Twentieth Century witnessed a number of attempts to rehabilitate Hegel within Anglophone philosophy after an earlier excommunication. One strategy was to attempt to divest Hegel of the bizarre metaphysical claims... more
The second half of the Twentieth Century witnessed a number of attempts to rehabilitate Hegel within Anglophone philosophy after an earlier excommunication. One strategy was to attempt to divest Hegel of the bizarre metaphysical claims with which he had been popularly associated by portraying him as in the tradition of Kant. To some Hegelians, however, this effectively disembowelled Hegel, robbing him of his greatest ideas, and so this “post-Kantian” interpretation provoked in turn a type of a metaphysically “realist” reaction, usually in an Aristotelian or Spinozist spirit.
Here I suggest a hitherto relatively unexplored way beyond the dichotomy of Aristotelian realist and Kantian idealist readings of Hegel by locating his idealism within the terrain of recent debates in modal metaphysics, and do this by returning to the outlook of the first philosopher to attempt to bring Hegel into the analytic conversation, John Niemeyer Findlay. In particular, I consider Hegel’s idealism as instantiating the metaphysical position that, following the work of Findlay’s former student, Arthur Prior, has come to be called “modal actualism”.
Here I suggest a hitherto relatively unexplored way beyond the dichotomy of Aristotelian realist and Kantian idealist readings of Hegel by locating his idealism within the terrain of recent debates in modal metaphysics, and do this by returning to the outlook of the first philosopher to attempt to bring Hegel into the analytic conversation, John Niemeyer Findlay. In particular, I consider Hegel’s idealism as instantiating the metaphysical position that, following the work of Findlay’s former student, Arthur Prior, has come to be called “modal actualism”.
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For many recent readers of Hegel, Wilfrid Sellars’s 1956 London lectures on the “Myth of the Given” have signaled an important rapprochement between Hegelian and analytic traditions in philosophy. Here I want to explore the ideas of... more
For many recent readers of Hegel, Wilfrid Sellars’s 1956 London lectures on the “Myth of the Given” have signaled an important rapprochement between Hegelian and analytic traditions in philosophy. Here I want to explore the ideas of another philosopher, also active in London in the 1950s, who consciously pursued such a goal: John N. Findlay. The ideas that Findlay brought to Hegel—sometimes converging with, sometimes diverging from those of Sellars—had been informed by his earlier study of the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong, and transformations of Meinong’s ideas by his student, the logician Ernst Mally.
These ideas that Findlay found Hegel-friendly are ones that have had a particular bearing on more recent analytic modal metaphysics, especially via the work of Findlay’s own former student, Arthur Prior. Given this, we might not be surprised at the similarities between the type of actualist interpretation of modal logic that Prior offered in opposition to David Lewis’s variant on Leibnizian possibilism, and Hegel’s approach to the category of “Actuality” [Wirklichkeit] at the end of the Objective Logic of The Science of Logic. But the similarities, I suggest, do not end there, as elements of Hegel treatment of predication in the Subjective Logic parallel similar elements found in the work of Mally and, more recently, “modal actualists” such as Prior and Stalnaker. In this paper I explore some puzzling features of Hegel’s treatment of predication in the Subjective Logic from the point of view of the need for a logic for thought about the modally complex actual world, as Hegel conceived it.
These ideas that Findlay found Hegel-friendly are ones that have had a particular bearing on more recent analytic modal metaphysics, especially via the work of Findlay’s own former student, Arthur Prior. Given this, we might not be surprised at the similarities between the type of actualist interpretation of modal logic that Prior offered in opposition to David Lewis’s variant on Leibnizian possibilism, and Hegel’s approach to the category of “Actuality” [Wirklichkeit] at the end of the Objective Logic of The Science of Logic. But the similarities, I suggest, do not end there, as elements of Hegel treatment of predication in the Subjective Logic parallel similar elements found in the work of Mally and, more recently, “modal actualists” such as Prior and Stalnaker. In this paper I explore some puzzling features of Hegel’s treatment of predication in the Subjective Logic from the point of view of the need for a logic for thought about the modally complex actual world, as Hegel conceived it.
Research Interests:
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Habermasian pragmatics Pragmatics plays a multi-dimensional role in Jfirgen Habermas's recent reconstruction of Frankfurt School "Critical Theory". 1 In the first place, the type of pragmatic approach to language as found, for example, in... more
Habermasian pragmatics Pragmatics plays a multi-dimensional role in Jfirgen Habermas's recent reconstruction of Frankfurt School "Critical Theory". 1 In the first place, the type of pragmatic approach to language as found, for example, in Wittgen-stein, Austin, or Seade, is seen as offering a way beyond the typical objections raised by positivists to the idea that social theories can carry an evalua-tive or critical dimension with respect to their objects. In the representationalist epistemology at the centre of what he terms the modern "philosophy of consciousness", truth is conceived as correspondence between representation and independent fact. For a pragmatic approach to language however, language is no longer regarded primarily as a set of abstract propositional texts capable of corresponding to non-linguistic facts. Rather, the focus is now placed on contextually embedded social acts of linguistic communication. From this perspective, the making of assertions is regarded as a type of social practice which can be performed properly or wrongly and which can be criticized or defended. The capacity for truth conceived pragmatically must mean something like the capacity of an act of assertion to achieve a consensus among the relevant speech community, a consensus that such an assertion was warranted. With such a framework shift, the basis for many positivist criticisms of the idea of the incorporation of evaluative or critical dimensions into social theories is seriously threatened. Within a representationalist epistemology, any defence of the idea that moral utterances could be true or false had been faced with the difficulty of saying what sort of "facts" such utterances could correspond to. From a pragmatic perspective however, one only needs the idea that a sentence might achieve a consensus among competent users to put evaluative discourse back onto an equal footing with any other type of discourse. It is thus in the wake of the pragmatic approach to language that
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McDowell's attempts to find a way out of the grip of some seemingly intractable problems besetting analytic philosophy has led him back to Kant and Hegel. Understanding, with Kant, the role played by concepts in experience will point the... more
McDowell's attempts to find a way out of the grip of some seemingly intractable problems besetting analytic philosophy has led him back to Kant and Hegel. Understanding, with Kant, the role played by concepts in experience will point the way forward, but Kant's thinking must be released from its own problems which threaten to reduce the contents of experience and knowledge to " facts about us ". Kant's " subjectivism " must be subjected to an " Hegelian " critique. However, McDowell's solution to that problem, which involves a radical reinterpretation of Kant's concept–intuition distinction, introduces new problems. Here I contrast McDowell's reinterpretation of the intuition–concept relation with a less radical one suggested by Wilfrid Sellars, and based on his diagnosis of the ambiguity of Kant's notion of intuition. The Sellarsian modest revision of Kant both gives a better account of perceptual experience and helps us better to understand the step that Hegel had taken beyond Kant.
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In this paper I examine the opposed approaches to perspectivity found in A. W. Moore’s representationalist and Robert Brandom’s inferentialist approaches to mental content, and argue that despite their opposition, they share an underlying... more
In this paper I examine the opposed approaches
to perspectivity found in A. W. Moore’s representationalist
and Robert Brandom’s inferentialist approaches
to mental content, and argue that despite their opposition,
they share an underlying rejection of Kant’s distinction between
intuitive and conceptual forms of representation.
Then, drawing on Ronald Giere’s “model-theoretic” approach
to science, I argue that something like the distinction
between intuitive and conceptual representational
genres should be reinstated, and that this move allows the
nature and limits of the perspectival metaphor to be more
clearly appreciated.
to perspectivity found in A. W. Moore’s representationalist
and Robert Brandom’s inferentialist approaches
to mental content, and argue that despite their opposition,
they share an underlying rejection of Kant’s distinction between
intuitive and conceptual forms of representation.
Then, drawing on Ronald Giere’s “model-theoretic” approach
to science, I argue that something like the distinction
between intuitive and conceptual representational
genres should be reinstated, and that this move allows the
nature and limits of the perspectival metaphor to be more
clearly appreciated.
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This paper challenges the commonly made claim that the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development of Bourdieu's work from its earliest structuralist through its later... more
This paper challenges the commonly made claim that the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development of Bourdieu's work from its earliest structuralist through its later 'post-structuralist' phase is better described in terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neo-Kantian to a distinctly Hegelian post-Kantian outlook. In his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to a bodily based 'logic of practice' to explain the binaristic logic of Lévi-Strauss' structuralist analyses of myth. Effectively working within the tradition of the Durkheimian approach to symbolic classification, Lévi-Strauss had inherited Durkheim's distinctly neo-Kantian understanding of the role of categories in experience and action—an account that conflated two forms of representation—'intuitions' and 'concepts—that Kant himself had held distinct. Bourdieu's appeal to the role of the body's dispositional habitus can be considered as a retrieval of Hegel's earlier quite different reworking of Kant's intuition-concept distinction in terms of distinct 'logics' with different forms of 'negation'. Bourdieu commonly acknowledged the parallels of his analyses of social life to those of Hegel, but opposed Hegelianism because he believed that Hegel had remained entrapped within the dynamics of mythopoeic thought. In contrast, Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, he claimed, by instituting a science of myth, had Critical Horizons 6:1 (2005)
The opening chapters of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit have for some time been taken as speaking to various concerns central to early analytic philosophy. In particular, Hegel's diagnosis of the problems of " sense-certainty " has been... more
The opening chapters of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit have for some time been taken as speaking to various concerns central to early analytic philosophy. In particular, Hegel's diagnosis of the problems of " sense-certainty " has been read as anticipating the problems discovered within attempts like that in early Russell to found knowledge on some immediate " acquaintance " with " sense-data. " Here, utilizing a parallel between " shapes of consciousness " and " shapes of speech, " I extend the idea of such an Hegelian " anticipation " to that of a dialectic running through analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Putti ng it very crudely, it might be said that in the much-discussed opening three chapters that make up the section " Consciousness " of his Phenomenol-ogy of Spirit Hegel sketches and " test-drives " various models for a consciousness able to experience and know the world. 1 Kant had thought of objects of experience as necessarily having conceptual (as well as spatio-temporal) form, but non-conceptual (" intuitional ") content. But for Hegel, that objects show themselves to have a conceptual form emerges as one the first lessons of experience as tracked in chapter 1. Moreover, in contrast to Kant's focus on the unit y and stabilit y of such form, Hegel wants to display a series in which successive " shapes of consciousness " emerge from the resolution of contradictions affecting their predecessors. 2 We might say that while Kant had famously asserted the identity of " the conditions of the possibilit y of experience in general " and the " conditions of the possibilit y of the objects of experience, " 3 Hegel points to the ever-present tension bet ween them, examining the fate of particular conceptions of the constitution of objects in the light of the " experience " based upon those conceptions, and with this
Kant's interpretation of space and time as a response to Newton's theologically based spatio-temporal realism is taken as a model of what it is to be a Kantian idealist about God and the self. In turn, Hegel's philosophy is... more
Kant's interpretation of space and time as a response to Newton's theologically based spatio-temporal realism is taken as a model of what it is to be a Kantian idealist about God and the self. In turn, Hegel's philosophy is taken as a development of this approach that ...
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Starting with the pragmatism of William James, I show how James, with his anti-Cartesian focus on the embodiment of the judging subject, was able to give to aesthetic judgment a significance that for empiricists it had traditionally... more
Starting with the pragmatism of William James, I show how James, with his anti-Cartesian focus on the embodiment of the judging subject, was able to give to aesthetic judgment a significance that for empiricists it had traditionally lacked. For the earlier empiricists, the "subjective" ...
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Whatever the external factors influencing the direction of his thought here, factors such as the attacks on psychologism in the fields of logic and mathematics laun-ched by philosophers like Frege and Husserl, there ex-isted one serious... more
Whatever the external factors influencing the direction of his thought here, factors such as the attacks on psychologism in the fields of logic and mathematics laun-ched by philosophers like Frege and Husserl, there ex-isted one serious internal problem for Dilthey's non- ...
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Kant's interpretation of space and time as a response to Newton's theologically based spatio-temporal realism is taken as a model of what it is to be a Kantian idealist about God and the self. In turn, Hegel's philosophy is... more
Kant's interpretation of space and time as a response to Newton's theologically based spatio-temporal realism is taken as a model of what it is to be a Kantian idealist about God and the self. In turn, Hegel's philosophy is taken as a development of this approach that ...
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... See Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway ... defence of the “idealist” (actually, “immaterialist”) reading of Leibniz see Robert Merrihew Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), and for a... more
... See Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway ... defence of the “idealist” (actually, “immaterialist”) reading of Leibniz see Robert Merrihew Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), and for a thorough-going critique, see Pauline Phemister, Leibniz and ...
ABSTRACT This paper examines Hegel's accounts of the nature of judgements and inferences in the ‘subjective logic’ of the Science of Logic, and does so in light of the history of the tradition of formal logic to his time. It is... more
ABSTRACT This paper examines Hegel's accounts of the nature of judgements and inferences in the ‘subjective logic’ of the Science of Logic, and does so in light of the history of the tradition of formal logic to his time. It is argued that, contrary to the attitude often displayed by interpreters of Hegel's logic, it is important to understand the positive role played by formal logic, ‘logic commonly so called’, in Hegel's own conception of logic. It is argued that Hegel's own scientific presentation [Darstellung] of logic relies on a dialectic working through the tradition of formal logic from Aristotle to Leibniz. The positions within the dialectic are most easily brought into focus in terms of the distinction between Aristotelian and Stoic logic, but they can also be seen as internal to Aristotelian logic. The logical tradition can be regarded as presenting a type of reductio ad absurdum, and a science of logic must examine what it was about Aristotle's original project that brought it to this fate.
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Critical Horizons works at the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics and social and critical theory. It brings together a unique combination of perspectives to create a vibrant forum for critical analysis and creative dissonance.... more
Critical Horizons works at the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics and social and critical theory. It brings together a unique combination of perspectives to create a vibrant forum for critical analysis and creative dissonance. Critical Horizons is dedicated to publishing original ...
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This paper examines Hegel's claim that philosophy " has no other object than God " as a claim about the essentiality of the idea of God to philosophy. on this idealist interpretation, even atheistic philosophies would presuppose... more
This paper examines Hegel's claim that philosophy " has no other object than God " as a claim about the essentiality of the idea of God to philosophy. on this idealist interpretation, even atheistic philosophies would presuppose rationally evaluable ideas of God, despite denials of the existence of anything corresponding to those ideas. This interpretation is then applied to Hegel's version of idealism in relation to those of two predecessors, leibniz and Kant. Hegel criticizes the idea of the Christian God present within his predecessors in terms of his own heterodox reading of the Trinity in order to resolve a paradox affecting them – the " paradox of perspectivism " .
Twentieth-century philosophical and psychological thought about emotion effectively started with the work of William James. While for much of the second half of that century, James's work had definitely fallen out of favour, recently... more
Twentieth-century philosophical and psychological thought about emotion effectively started with the work of William James. While for much of the second half of that century, James's work had definitely fallen out of favour, recently there have been definite signs of a revival. 1 Such a positive re-evaluation is, I believe, well-deserved, as James's approach to emotion has many under-appreciated features. Moreover, many of the traditional criticisms not only aim at a caricature, but rely on assumptions about which James was overtly critical. Here I want to work my way towards a way of reading James that puts his views in relation to a variety of approaches to the mind that have been adopted at various times since the seventeenth century, and that can be broadly linked by their shared anti-Cartesian stances. I will start with the familiar thought of James that the subjective " feeling " of an emotion is nothing more than an awareness of bodily states and processes, primarily conceived as located " peripherally " within viscera, skeletal muscle, and skin. I'll then proceed by addressing the common criticism that such an approach denies any cognitive dimension to the emotions. James, I'll suggest, should be seen as part of a tradition that aimed at undermining the types of dichotomous conceptions of body and mind that his critics still took for granted. This broadly anti-Cartesian tradition can be thought of as including thinkers as diverse as the common-sense realist, Thomas Reid, on the one hand and Leibniz and later idealists and romantics, on the other.
A paradox generated by Robert Pippin's approach to interpreting Hegel's "science of pure thinking" is used to reflect upon the nature of Hegel's understanding of the nature of judgment. Pippin wants to follow McDowell's suggestions... more
A paradox generated by Robert Pippin's approach to interpreting Hegel's "science of pure thinking" is used to reflect upon the nature of Hegel's understanding of the nature of judgment. Pippin wants to follow McDowell's suggestions concerning the "unboundedness of the conceptual" realm, inspired by Wittgenstein's claim that 'When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we-and our meaning-do not stop anywhere short of the fact, but we mean: this-is-so". However, McDowell's account had been developed in the context of perceptual knowledge claims, whereas the metaphysical knowledge claims implicit in the Logic are a priori and hold independently of any empirical knowledge.
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It is argued that the features of a “liberal naturalism” as sought by advocates of that approach to philosophy might be found in the writings of “actualists” within recent debates in analytic modal metaphysics—here, Robert Stalnaker. The... more
It is argued that the features of a “liberal naturalism” as sought by advocates of that approach to philosophy might be found in the writings of “actualists” within recent debates in analytic modal metaphysics—here, Robert Stalnaker. The advantage of actualism over naturalism, it is argued, is that the idea of the actual world comes with the mind built into it from the start, and so one is not faced with the problem of finding a place for mind in nature. This should not be regarded as evidence of some unwanted “supernaturalism” on the part of actualists, however, but rather is a consequence of the actualist’s critique of the presupposed supernaturalistic semantic assumptions within rival views.
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In this paper I argue for an interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy beyond a choice between two distinctly “unrealistic” options: Robert Brandom’s “ro bust” realism and Richard Rorty’s skeptical anti-realism. I thus interpret Hegel’s... more
In this paper I argue for an interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy beyond a choice between two distinctly “unrealistic” options: Robert Brandom’s “ro bust” realism and Richard Rorty’s skeptical anti-realism. I thus interpret Hegel’s idealism as a form of weakened Platonic realism (a realism about ideas, or real istic idealism) that falls between the interpretations of Rorty and Brandom. This position broadly coincides with the “actualism” found within debates over mo dality within analytic philosophy and represented there by Arthur Prior and Rob ert Stalnaker. For the actualist, there is a sense in which the actual world neces sarily contains “mind” and its ideational contents, but this is a trivial sense. What we mean by the actual world, in contrast to some of the non-actual possi ble alternatives to it, is the world as containing us, and we have no option other than to think of ourselves as “minded”.
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Over the last decade, Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard have stressed various Aristotelian features of Hegel’s idealism as part of a response to critics who had claimed that their “post-Kantian” interpretation had over-assimilated Hegel to... more
Over the last decade, Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard have stressed various Aristotelian features of Hegel’s idealism as part of a response to critics who had claimed that their “post-Kantian” interpretation had over-assimilated Hegel to Kant’s transcendental idealism. In this paper I examine Pinkard’s “disenchanted” Aristotelian construal of Hegel’s naturalism and argue for the need to incorporate specifically Platonic dimensions in this regard. This is to counter the sense in which, for Hegel, Aristotle’s logic had suffered from the same limitation to “the understanding” that he criticised in Kant.
In comparison to Aristotle, it had been Plato who signalled what for Hegel was a move beyond Aristotle’s logic: the explicit distinction between the categories of singularity and particularity. Resources for this could be found in Plato’s mythically presented dialogue, Timaeus, in which Plato invoked the three “means” of Pythagorean music theory, the geometric, arithmetic and harmonic, to conceive of the way in which the cosmic animal hung together as a syllogism despite incommensurabilities among its basic determinations. The significance of this for Hegel’s understanding of the relations between family, civil society and state in his Philosophy of Right is then explored.
In comparison to Aristotle, it had been Plato who signalled what for Hegel was a move beyond Aristotle’s logic: the explicit distinction between the categories of singularity and particularity. Resources for this could be found in Plato’s mythically presented dialogue, Timaeus, in which Plato invoked the three “means” of Pythagorean music theory, the geometric, arithmetic and harmonic, to conceive of the way in which the cosmic animal hung together as a syllogism despite incommensurabilities among its basic determinations. The significance of this for Hegel’s understanding of the relations between family, civil society and state in his Philosophy of Right is then explored.
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The reasons why philosophers with a this-worldly bent reject idealism are obvious enough. Idealism is typically understood as a philosophical outlook that gives a necessary place to mind in reality, and this seems to suggest traditional... more
The reasons why philosophers with a this-worldly bent reject idealism are obvious enough. Idealism is typically understood as a philosophical outlook that gives a necessary place to mind in reality, and this seems to suggest traditional theological views like that which sees the material world as a creation of a transcendent mind. Naturalism has seemed the obvious alternative: why should the natural sciences stop at explaining our minds as the products of natural processes? Did not Darwin make plausible this general idea of the mind as something that has appeared in an essentially mind-less world?
Huw Price has argued against the presuppositions of an “object naturalism” that presupposes in its methodology an account of the mind that, in its representationalist capacities, is incompatible with the naturalism it espouses. In broad agreement I here argue for an idealist alternative to Price’s “subject naturalism” in which idealism is interpreted, from a modally metaphysical perspective, as a type of “actualism”. In the course of this Hegel is linked, both historically and substantively, to a variety of contemporary, finitistic critiques of the classical logic that “object naturalism” presupposes.
Huw Price has argued against the presuppositions of an “object naturalism” that presupposes in its methodology an account of the mind that, in its representationalist capacities, is incompatible with the naturalism it espouses. In broad agreement I here argue for an idealist alternative to Price’s “subject naturalism” in which idealism is interpreted, from a modally metaphysical perspective, as a type of “actualism”. In the course of this Hegel is linked, both historically and substantively, to a variety of contemporary, finitistic critiques of the classical logic that “object naturalism” presupposes.
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Parallels are often drawn between Hegel and the later Wittgenstein, but an examination of Hegel’s conception of judgement from the Science of Logic reveals curious parallels with central doctrines of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. There... more
Parallels are often drawn between Hegel and the later Wittgenstein, but
an examination of Hegel’s conception of judgement from the Science of Logic reveals curious parallels with central doctrines of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. There
Hegel appeals to a type of primitive linguistic structure or Satz consisting of
the concatenation of two singular terms or names, and like Wittgenstein’s “Elementarsäzte”, these have the properties of being mutually independent, essentially positive, and with only one way of being true (or for Hegel, “correct”).
For Hegel, to play a role in reasoning, such a Satz must have one of its terms
re-determined as general such that it can now enter into inferential relations
with other judgements. The immediate product of this type of transformation
was a form of judgement, the judgement of existence (Dasein) that he exemplified by colour judgements, and such judgements had a logical form different to
that of the Tractatus’ compound Sätze that Elementarsäzte were meant to constitute. When in the late 1920s Wittgenstein moved away from the doctrines of the
Tractatus, considerations of the logic of colour judgements with similar features
to those of Hegel’s judgements of Dasein played a role.
an examination of Hegel’s conception of judgement from the Science of Logic reveals curious parallels with central doctrines of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. There
Hegel appeals to a type of primitive linguistic structure or Satz consisting of
the concatenation of two singular terms or names, and like Wittgenstein’s “Elementarsäzte”, these have the properties of being mutually independent, essentially positive, and with only one way of being true (or for Hegel, “correct”).
For Hegel, to play a role in reasoning, such a Satz must have one of its terms
re-determined as general such that it can now enter into inferential relations
with other judgements. The immediate product of this type of transformation
was a form of judgement, the judgement of existence (Dasein) that he exemplified by colour judgements, and such judgements had a logical form different to
that of the Tractatus’ compound Sätze that Elementarsäzte were meant to constitute. When in the late 1920s Wittgenstein moved away from the doctrines of the
Tractatus, considerations of the logic of colour judgements with similar features
to those of Hegel’s judgements of Dasein played a role.
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The problem of giving objective representations to the world was a central concern for the German idealists. Kant had secured the theoretical objectivity of world-accounts, but only at the price of omitting the existence of free rational... more
The problem of giving objective representations to the world was a central concern for the German idealists. Kant had secured the theoretical objectivity of world-accounts, but only at the price of omitting the existence of free rational beings, the acknowledgement of whom was limited to practical (moral) intentional states. But by omitting the existence of beings we are otherwise obliged to acknowledge, Kant thus denied objective theoretical knowledge of reality as such, such knowledge being limited to appearances, with an ersatz form of “objectivity” redefined as “objectively justified”.
Hegel’s solution to this dilemma, I suggest, included a narrowing of the scope of metaphysics to the contents the actual world, but understood in such a way that alternate possibilities could be understood as internal to it. In this, Hegel’s position bears similarities to those of contemporary and recent “modal actualists” such as Robert Stalnaker and Arthur Prior. While Stalnaker and Prior opposed the “possibilism” of David Lewis, Hegel opposed that of Leibniz and the modified form of it found in Kant. By this means, the actualist incorporates minded beings into the (actual) world for theoretical cognition. This results in a form of idealism, but a non-worrisome form because while minded beings are thereby grasped as being parts of some possible worlds (in particular, ours), they are not assigned to all possible worlds.
Hegel’s solution to this dilemma, I suggest, included a narrowing of the scope of metaphysics to the contents the actual world, but understood in such a way that alternate possibilities could be understood as internal to it. In this, Hegel’s position bears similarities to those of contemporary and recent “modal actualists” such as Robert Stalnaker and Arthur Prior. While Stalnaker and Prior opposed the “possibilism” of David Lewis, Hegel opposed that of Leibniz and the modified form of it found in Kant. By this means, the actualist incorporates minded beings into the (actual) world for theoretical cognition. This results in a form of idealism, but a non-worrisome form because while minded beings are thereby grasped as being parts of some possible worlds (in particular, ours), they are not assigned to all possible worlds.
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Agreeing with Sally Sedgwick’s claim that Hegel’s “empty formalism” critique of Kant’s philosophy can only be understood against the background of Hegel’s broader critique of Kant’s account of reason, I here attempt to ground both... more
Agreeing with Sally Sedgwick’s claim that Hegel’s “empty formalism” critique of Kant’s philosophy can only be understood against the background of Hegel’s broader critique of Kant’s account of reason, I here attempt to ground both critiques in an interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics that I develop from the work of John N. Findlay in which Hegel’s idealism is interpreted as a form of the “modal actualism” attributed to Findlay’s student, the modal logician Arthur Prior. Just as Prior’s actualism was directed against the possibilism of David Lewis, Hegel’s was directed against that of Leibniz as well as the Leibnizian features of Kant’s practical philosophy.
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The categorical structures of Hegel’s Logic, which forms the first part of the systematic Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, is meant to provide the conceptual resources for understanding how the system as a whole hangs together.... more
The categorical structures of Hegel’s Logic, which forms the first part of the systematic Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, is meant to provide the conceptual resources for understanding how the system as a whole hangs together. However, such an understanding is, of course, dependent upon one’s prior understanding of the Logic itself. Here it is argued that Hegel’s relatively ignored and poorly understood “Subjective Logic”, making up the third part of the Encyclopedia Logic, is particularly relevant for understanding both the internal structure and the external relations of the Encyclopedia Philosophy of Spirit.
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Towards the end of the Eighteenth Century, hermeneutic thought in Germany developed in close proximity to the emerging “idealist” and “romantic” philosophical movements inspired by the “critical philosophy” of Immanuel Kant. Crucially... more
Towards the end of the Eighteenth Century, hermeneutic thought in Germany developed in close proximity to the emerging “idealist” and “romantic” philosophical movements inspired by the “critical philosophy” of Immanuel Kant. Crucially this was a time that witnessed the growth of interest in the structure of national languages and literatures, and the question was soon posed as to the relation between what Kant had postulated as the a priori structure governing an individual’s experience and thought and the structure of the actual language that that individual had assimilated from their cultural tradition.
This essay examines the emergence of the strong language-dependence thesis in the approach of the early hermeneutic thinkers Hamann and Herder, and their use of this idea to criticise the “purism” of Kantian thought. It then follows the ensuing response by Kant and his followers, especially Fichte and Hegel, as the latter attempted to bring a linguistic dimension to a Kantian inspired idealism. The issue of the relation of thought to language that was at the heart of this complexly developing debate has continued to be of philosophical concern up to the present.
This essay examines the emergence of the strong language-dependence thesis in the approach of the early hermeneutic thinkers Hamann and Herder, and their use of this idea to criticise the “purism” of Kantian thought. It then follows the ensuing response by Kant and his followers, especially Fichte and Hegel, as the latter attempted to bring a linguistic dimension to a Kantian inspired idealism. The issue of the relation of thought to language that was at the heart of this complexly developing debate has continued to be of philosophical concern up to the present.
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Since having been dismissed by Bertrand Russell in the early twentieth century, Hegel has rarely been considered as having views relevant for the core logical and metaphysical concerns of analytic philosophy. According to Russell, Hegel... more
Since having been dismissed by Bertrand Russell in the early twentieth century, Hegel has rarely been considered as having views relevant for the core logical and metaphysical concerns of analytic philosophy. According to Russell, Hegel had an antiquated metaphysics that derived from a naïve acceptance of Aristotle’s subject–predicate conception of judgment—an approach that had been made redundant by the revolutionary work in logic by Frege. However, the grounds invoked by Russell for Hegel’s excommunication came into question when philosophers and logicians re-engaged with modal issues from the 1960s. For example, Aristotle once again came to be taken seriously by those anxious to avoid what they saw as the unwanted metaphysical consequences of Russellian extensionalism in logic when applied to modal logic. Hegel’s views, however, have never been reexamined in a similar way.
In this paper I argue that in his account of judgment in his Science of Logic Hegel offers an approach that is very different to that as portrayed by Russell. In particular, it is an approach that offers novel ways of thinking about puzzling issues concerning the logical treatment of tense and modality—topics that have become central to mainstream debates.
In this paper I argue that in his account of judgment in his Science of Logic Hegel offers an approach that is very different to that as portrayed by Russell. In particular, it is an approach that offers novel ways of thinking about puzzling issues concerning the logical treatment of tense and modality—topics that have become central to mainstream debates.
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It might be thought paradoxical that Richard Rorty, a philosopher with a deep distrust of metaphysics, could have had such a positive regard for Hegel, widely thought to be one of the most extravagant metaphysicians in the history of... more
It might be thought paradoxical that Richard Rorty, a philosopher with a deep distrust of metaphysics, could have had such a positive regard for Hegel, widely thought to be one of the most extravagant metaphysicians in the history of philosophy. Rorty’s attitude to Hegel was based on the idea that he had philosophized in a way that could achieve the benefit traditionally thought to come from metaphysical knowledge—freedom—but without any need for the truth of his philosophical claims. Linking the writing of Hegel to that of Proust, Rorty had described Hegel’s practice as redescription—a practice in the course of which the vocabulary in which we talk about the world is changed. And as truth is always decided in terms of some particular vocabulary accepted as normative, redescriptive speech acts cannot thereby themselves be considered true.
While in broad agreement with Rorty’s emphasis on the role of redescription in Hegel’s method, and with his wish to free Hegel from the constraints of traditional metaphysics, I argue against Rorty’s account of Hegel’s redescriptive methodology. His account is, I suggest, tied to a misleading Sartrean interpretation of Hegel’s famous “master–slave” dialectic—an interpretation that is in fact closer to a Fichte’s use of the notion of recognition than Hegel’s own. When Hegel’s concept of recognition is understood in relation to the logic of his concept of the will, a more nuanced account of recognition is achieved. This is one that coheres with a “redescription” of the task of metaphysics that portrays it as an inquiry into a modally conceived actual world. Unlike Rorty’s redescription, this is one that preserves the relevance of the value of truth and not merely that of freedom for metaphysics.
While in broad agreement with Rorty’s emphasis on the role of redescription in Hegel’s method, and with his wish to free Hegel from the constraints of traditional metaphysics, I argue against Rorty’s account of Hegel’s redescriptive methodology. His account is, I suggest, tied to a misleading Sartrean interpretation of Hegel’s famous “master–slave” dialectic—an interpretation that is in fact closer to a Fichte’s use of the notion of recognition than Hegel’s own. When Hegel’s concept of recognition is understood in relation to the logic of his concept of the will, a more nuanced account of recognition is achieved. This is one that coheres with a “redescription” of the task of metaphysics that portrays it as an inquiry into a modally conceived actual world. Unlike Rorty’s redescription, this is one that preserves the relevance of the value of truth and not merely that of freedom for metaphysics.
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In Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind [EPM], as part of his critique of the empiricist ‘myth’ concerning the mind’s immediate knowledge of ‘the given’, Wilfrid Sellars had proposed the thesis of ‘psychological nominalism’—the thesis that... more
In Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind [EPM], as part of his critique of the empiricist ‘myth’ concerning the mind’s immediate knowledge of ‘the given’, Wilfrid Sellars had proposed the thesis of ‘psychological nominalism’—the thesis that ‘all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., … indeed, all awareness even of particulars—is a linguistic affair’. The other ‘myth’ with which EPM closes, the myth of Jones, the radical linguistic innovator, is meant to counter the myth of the given by providing the reader with a picture of how psychological nominalism could be true.
In their developments of Sellars’ ideas, Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom, who both argue for parallels between the anti-empiricist dimensions of Sellars and Hegel, interpret psychological nominalism as a form of psychological anti-realism. In contrast, in this chapter it is argued that for both Sellars and Hegel psychological nominalism does not imply anti-realism about the mental. After the Jonesian revolution, we not only had leant to talk about ourselves as if we had minds, we actually came to have them.
In their developments of Sellars’ ideas, Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom, who both argue for parallels between the anti-empiricist dimensions of Sellars and Hegel, interpret psychological nominalism as a form of psychological anti-realism. In contrast, in this chapter it is argued that for both Sellars and Hegel psychological nominalism does not imply anti-realism about the mental. After the Jonesian revolution, we not only had leant to talk about ourselves as if we had minds, we actually came to have them.
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For many readers of Hegel in the twentieth century, and following the interpretation given by Alexandre Kojève, Hegel’s short “master-slave dialectic” from the Phenomenology of Spirit had played the role of cipher for the understanding... more
For many readers of Hegel in the twentieth century, and following the interpretation given by Alexandre Kojève, Hegel’s short “master-slave dialectic” from the Phenomenology of Spirit had played the role of cipher for the understanding Hegel’s philosophy as a whole. In particular it signaled the centrality of the human transformation of nature in the historical journey towards universal freedom. In this essay, however, Hegel’s parable is transposed into a more idealist key, and is read as about philosophy itself.
As a philosophical outlook, Aristotelianism shares many of the features of Hegel’s purportedly independent master, and Stoicism the features of the conversely dependent slave. But the Aristotelian master is oriented to the cognitive incorporation of knowledge-satisfying essences, not worldly substances themselves, and the transformations of the Stoic-slave are directed not to substances but to their representations. Nevertheless, like the original slaves, these cognitive laborers, in transforming representations thereby transform themselves, and independence is achieved as the result of collective cognitive self-transformation. With this, not only the human species, but philosophy itself comes to be understood as essentially historical in nature.
As a philosophical outlook, Aristotelianism shares many of the features of Hegel’s purportedly independent master, and Stoicism the features of the conversely dependent slave. But the Aristotelian master is oriented to the cognitive incorporation of knowledge-satisfying essences, not worldly substances themselves, and the transformations of the Stoic-slave are directed not to substances but to their representations. Nevertheless, like the original slaves, these cognitive laborers, in transforming representations thereby transform themselves, and independence is achieved as the result of collective cognitive self-transformation. With this, not only the human species, but philosophy itself comes to be understood as essentially historical in nature.
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Analytic philosophy as it developed in the English-speaking world in the first half of the Twentieth Century saw itself as a revolutionary movement liberating itself from the constraints of the past. In particular, the originators of... more
Analytic philosophy as it developed in the English-speaking world in the first half of the Twentieth Century saw itself as a revolutionary movement liberating itself from the constraints of the past. In particular, the originators of analytic philosophy in Great Britain—Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore—wanted to liberate philosophy from the Kantian and Hegelian idealism that defined the approach of their teachers. In the case of Russell in particular, it was the new logic that he was developing on a model provided by Gottlob Frege that was to be the instrument for liberation from the influence of Hegel. From its inception, however, Russell's logic was criticised by C. I. Lewis for having an inadequate notion of logical consequence, and Lewis developed the discipline of modal logic to provide a more adequate account. It was not until the second half of the century, however, that the discipline of modal logic took off, bringing in its wake a metaphysical problem of how to avoid an extravagant and counter-intuitive consequence for treating modal notions realistically—a position embraced by David Lewis with his Leibnizian idea of a plurality of possible worlds. In this paper, I suggest that the most plausible metaphysical position that domesticates the idea of possible worlds—the minimally metaphysical version of " actualism " embraced by Robert Stalnaker—is, in important respects similar to Hegel's domestication of Leibniz's version of possible worlds. Ironically, an internal dialectic within analytic philosophy has led back to its original arch-enemy.
Richard Rorty stands as the paradigm of the “post-analytic” philosopher, or, to put it in his own terms, of the “ambidextrous” philosopher, capable of bringing technical developments in twentieth-century analytic philosophy together with... more
Richard Rorty stands as the paradigm of the “post-analytic” philosopher, or, to put it in his own terms, of the “ambidextrous” philosopher, capable of bringing technical developments in twentieth-century analytic philosophy together with broader philosophical concerns stemming from the idealist tradition of the nineteenth century—a tradition with which “analysis” was meant to have definitively broken. In this essay it is argued that despite his attempts to fashion a neo-Hegelian historicist alternative to analytic philosophy—one fitting a conception of philosophy as “conversation” rather than the representation of reality—Rorty’s alternative is shaped by assumptions deriving from the analytic tradition with which he was trying to break.
For over a hundred years, idealist philosophy has been often dismissed as a nineteenthcentury aberrationa purportedly backward-looking philosophy that seeks consolation in religion in the face of a rapidly secularizing world. But from... more
For over a hundred years, idealist philosophy has been often dismissed as a nineteenthcentury aberrationa purportedly backward-looking philosophy that seeks consolation in religion in the face of a rapidly secularizing world. But from such an ...
... The Dialect of Lord and Bondsman in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit Paul Redding "Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only as something... more
... The Dialect of Lord and Bondsman in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit Paul Redding "Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only as something acknowledged".1 ...
Recent scholarship has helped to demythologise the life and work of Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg who, as the poet “Novalis”, had come to instantiate the nineteenth-century’s stereotype of the romantic poet. Among Hardenberg’s... more
Recent scholarship has helped to demythologise the life and work of Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg who, as the poet “Novalis”, had come to instantiate the nineteenth-century’s stereotype of the romantic poet. Among Hardenberg’s interests that seem to sit uneasily with this literary persona were his interests in science and mathematics, and especially in the idea, traceable back to Leibniz, of a mathematically based computational approach to language. Hardenberg’s approach to language, and his attempts to bring mathematics to bear on poetry, is examined in relation to debates that developed late in the eighteenth century over the relation of language to thought—debates which share many features with contemporary ones in this area.
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In her latest book Danielle Macbeth has embarked on a project that, in its ambitious attempt to chart the realization of reason in an historical process running from the Greeks to the present, can be compared to Hegel's. For her, the key... more
In her latest book Danielle Macbeth has embarked on a project that, in its ambitious attempt to chart the realization of reason in an historical process running from the Greeks to the present, can be compared to Hegel's. For her, the key philosophical figure in this narrative is the logician Gottlob Frege, and although Frege is usually thought of as the thinker behind the emergence of analytic philosophy, Macbeth's Frege is dissociated from that context, and portrayed as instantiating the final phase in her Hegelian narrative—pure reason as a power of knowing. Here Macbeth's and Hegel's projects are compared, and a non-traditional interpretation of Hegel's concept of metaphysical knowledge is invoked in an effort to sharpen what Macbeth might actually mean by her conception of pure reason as a power of knowing. Danielle Macbeth's Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing is, as its title and subtitle suggest, a book of very ambitious scope: it sets out a philosophical account of the realization of reason from the Greeks to the present. Philosophically considered, the idea of the realization of reason, of course, means more than simply the accumulation of knowledge. Here it means the historical development and explication of publically assessable rational practices that can be considered as the infrastructure responsible for the attainment of such knowledge. Macbeth accepts the idea that it was the development of natural language that allowed our species to move beyond mere animal existence, making possible a type of rational life beyond the realm of organic life in a way parallel to that in which the development of organic life went beyond the merely physical and chemical processes preceding it. But particular symbolic and, importantly, written, extensions of natural language have been part of the process of allowing reason to reflect and work upon, and so transform its own
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In Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution, Rebecca Comay brings together the figures of Hegel and Freud. As a student at Tübingen, having watched from a distance the unfolding of the French Revolution, Hegel came up with an... more
In Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution, Rebecca Comay brings together the figures of Hegel and Freud. As a student at Tübingen, having watched from a distance the unfolding of the French Revolution, Hegel came up with an account of its central place in the development of the modern world that purported to be based on an idealist logic underlying all things. For the generation that came after Hegel, his attitude to the question of a revolution in his own country exemplified what this idealism entailed. The idealist could think of Germany as having already had its " revolution " in " spirit " ; it had then no need for one in material, practical reality. Critics like Marx and Engels would explode the pretensions of this attitude as an " ideology " rather than a " scientific " disclosure of reality, one to be diagnosed in Comays' words as " a thinly disguised blend of anxiety, envy, and Schadenfreude … typical of the " German misery. " (Comay, 1) One might expect, then, a parallel to be drawn between the attitude of Freud and the diagnostic stances of Marxist critics of Hegel. Marx and Freud are commonly paired as practitioners of a " hermeneutics of suspicion " , with Marx reducing ideologies such as religions or the religion-like metaphysics of Absolute idealism to effects of forces working below the level of consciousness. That is, one might expect Freud to be used in a diagnosis of absolute idealism as a symptom of whatever " trauma " underlies that condition of a peoples that was captured by Marx's idea of the " German misery " that Hegel exemplified. But Comay's book takes an unexpected turn here. The " German misery " is taken as the model of trauma qua " modal, temporal and … historical category " to be explored, and explored with " Hegel, of all people, its most lucid theorist. " (Comay, 4) Hegel thus becomes the partner of Freud in the exploration of the human condition, not the object of diagnosis in a Marx-Freud alliance.
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While for many of his readers in the nineteenth century Hegel seemed to have offered a viable systematic philosophy, this has generally not been the case in the twentieth. The reasons for this are undoubtedly complex, but among them would... more
While for many of his readers in the nineteenth century Hegel seemed to have offered a viable systematic philosophy, this has generally not been the case in the twentieth. The reasons for this are undoubtedly complex, but among them would surely be the proximity ...
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Research Interests: Hegel and Interpretation
This paper reconstructs a Hegelian response to the charge that the Greek heritage of modern western scientific culture has resulted in a problematic attitude towards the idea of nothingness. According to this charge, the modern scientific... more
This paper reconstructs a Hegelian response to the charge that the Greek heritage of modern western scientific culture has resulted in a problematic attitude towards the idea of nothingness. According to this charge, the modern scientific viewpoint's dependence on modern abstract mathematics commits it to the reality of the number zero, a number missing in ancient Greek mathematics and only slowly integrated into Western culture after its introduction in the thirteenth century from Arab and, ultimately, Indian sources. Early Indian mathematics, it has been argued, had been able to accommodate the use of zero because Indian religion and philosophy, with its positive attitude to the notion of nothingness, had not provided the type of obstacle found in Greek metaphysics, with its general hostility to this notion. It is here argued that Hegel's way of dealing with the problematic "infinitesimals" used to make sense of the calculus introduced in the seventeenth century by Newton and Leibniz considerably complicates this picture. Hegel finds in certain Pythagorean directions in ancient Greek mathematics ways of addressing the problem of the incommensurability that, according to the Greeks, distinguished continuous from discrete magnitudes. These ways differ from the modern "analytic" response of reducing continuous to discrete magnitudes, a reduction to which Hegel was opposed. Hegel's alternative to the modern "analytic" turn, I suggest, reveals dimensions within Greek philosophy that give a fundamental place to nothingness that does not need zero to be treated as "real" in either of the ancient Indian or modern mathematical senses.
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The Section “Magnitude (Quantity)” in Book I of Hegel’s Science of Logic might be regarded as containing his philosophy of mathematics, traditionally understood as the “science of magnitude”. In this paper I examine a key chapter of that... more
The Section “Magnitude (Quantity)” in Book I of Hegel’s Science of Logic might be regarded as containing his philosophy of mathematics, traditionally understood as the “science of magnitude”. In this paper I examine a key chapter of that section, Chapter 2, devoted to the concept of Verhältnis, a word standardly, although not ideally, translated as “ratio”. In section 1 I review Hegel’s tripartite classification of the forms of Verhältnis, and, in section 2, relate its most developed form, the so-called power-ratio, to a Pythagorean strand within ancient mathematics linked to Plato as opposed to the more familiar approach found in Euclid and reflected in the work of Aristotle. Central to this notion, it is argued, is the way that this Pythagorean-Platonic tradition dealt with a fundamental problem that had arisen in Greek mathematics, that of the incommensurability between ratios between the continuous magnitudes (lines, areas, volumes, etc.) of geometry, on the one hand, and ratios between discrete magnitudes, the numbers of arithmetic, on the other. In section 3, the power-ratio is then brought to bear on Hegel’s reception of the modern use of calculus, in which he portrays key innovations of Newton as reliant upon this Platonic-Pythagorean approach to the relation of arithmetic to geometry. In the final section, I signal some general consequences of Hegel’s Platonic approach to ratio for his logic more generally, in particular for how to conceive of the relation between logical and mathematical truths. This is pursued by questioning the recent claim by Houlgate, that Hegel adopted a “logicist” attitude towards this relationship, grounding mathematical truths in logical ones.
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Hegel has commonly been ridiculed for views expressed in his 1801 dissertation, On the Orbits of the Planets, in the final pages of which he had adopted a series of numbers from Plato’s Timaeus—a cosmological text earlier taken seriously... more
Hegel has commonly been ridiculed for views expressed in his 1801 dissertation, On the Orbits of the Planets, in the final pages of which he had adopted a series of numbers from Plato’s Timaeus—a cosmological text earlier taken seriously by Kepler—to account for the ratios of the distances from the sun of then then-known six planets of the solar system. While defenders of Hegel have usually toned down the extent of these claims, I argue that Hegel’s reference to Plato’s Pythagorean cosmology must be taken seriously—not as cosmology, however, but as instantiating the logic appropriate for empirically based science.
Hegel’s allusion to Plato’s mythologically expressed “syllogism” is consistent with his idea that logic as Plato conceived it allowed its application to the empirical world but that this applicability had been compromised by Aristotle adaptation of it. With the proper grasp of logic’s utilization of the category of “singularity” in its difference to “particularity”—available to Plato but not Aristotle—we can appreciate how while Kepler’s Laws were empirically based, Newton’s were not as they relied on abstract entities that could not be justified empirically.
Hegel’s allusion to Plato’s mythologically expressed “syllogism” is consistent with his idea that logic as Plato conceived it allowed its application to the empirical world but that this applicability had been compromised by Aristotle adaptation of it. With the proper grasp of logic’s utilization of the category of “singularity” in its difference to “particularity”—available to Plato but not Aristotle—we can appreciate how while Kepler’s Laws were empirically based, Newton’s were not as they relied on abstract entities that could not be justified empirically.
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A paradox generated by Robert Pippin’s approach to interpreting Hegel’s “science of pure thinking” is used to reflect upon the nature of Hegel’s understanding of the nature of judgment. Pippin wants to follow McDowell’s suggestions... more
A paradox generated by Robert Pippin’s approach to interpreting Hegel’s “science of pure thinking” is used to reflect upon the nature of Hegel’s understanding of the nature of judgment. Pippin wants to follow McDowell’s suggestions concerning the “unboundedness of the conceptual” realm, inspired by Wittgenstein’s claim that ‘When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact, but we mean: this-is-so”. However, McDowell’s account had been developed in the context of perceptual knowledge claims, whereas the metaphysical knowledge claims implicit in the Logic are a priori and hold independently of any empirical knowledge.
It is argued here that the paradox is dissolved by uncoupling Hegel’s position from the Kantian and Fregean presuppositions implicit in McDowell’s reading. Wittgenstein’s sentence, when read from the perspective of a logic with dual judgment forms would count as what Boole had called a secondary, or abstract proposition, rather than as an expression of perceptual experience. Hegel’s account of judgment shows a similar duality in contrast to Frege’s univocal account. When this categorical distinction between singularity and particularity that underlies this duality is seen as applied to the world, as in his Philosophy of Nature, the “unboundedness of the conceptual” can be understood as having a different meaning to the way in which it is taken by McDowell.
It is argued here that the paradox is dissolved by uncoupling Hegel’s position from the Kantian and Fregean presuppositions implicit in McDowell’s reading. Wittgenstein’s sentence, when read from the perspective of a logic with dual judgment forms would count as what Boole had called a secondary, or abstract proposition, rather than as an expression of perceptual experience. Hegel’s account of judgment shows a similar duality in contrast to Frege’s univocal account. When this categorical distinction between singularity and particularity that underlies this duality is seen as applied to the world, as in his Philosophy of Nature, the “unboundedness of the conceptual” can be understood as having a different meaning to the way in which it is taken by McDowell.
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Both Hegel and Wittgenstein were attracted to Goethe’s colour theory, but, I argue, not for the reasons Goethe himself offered in declaring his approach better than Newton’s. In this paper, I compare the relevance for logic of Goethe’s... more
Both Hegel and Wittgenstein were attracted to Goethe’s colour theory, but, I argue, not for the reasons Goethe himself offered in declaring his approach better than Newton’s. In this paper, I compare the relevance for logic of Goethe’s observations about colour in relation to both Hegel’s subjective logic and the issues with which Wittgenstein was struggling in the decade after the publication of the Tractatus.
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With his project of a universal characteristic, Leibniz is commonly seen as a precursor to modern developments in logic that also gave rise to the computer age. But Leibniz had also conceived of plans for a different, non-numerical form... more
With his project of a universal characteristic, Leibniz is commonly seen as a precursor to modern developments in logic that also gave rise to the computer age. But Leibniz had also conceived of plans for a different, non-numerical form of logical “analysis”, one influenced by projective geometry and the renaissance theory of perspective and that appealed to the analysis of situations, “analysis situs”. While this is usually associated with later developments in areas of mathematics, such as analytic topology, this essay examines the influence of this dimension of Leibniz’s thought on the dialectically conceived hermeneutics of Friedrich Schleiermacher.
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Early in the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel describes the “whole of philosophy” as resembling a “circle of circles”. The encyclopaedic system itself describes a circular path, ending with philosophy, thereby taking the reader to the point at... more
Early in the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel describes the “whole of philosophy” as resembling a “circle of circles”. The encyclopaedic system itself describes a circular path, ending with philosophy, thereby taking the reader to the point at which the Encyclopaedia had started, logic.
I take this ubiquitous cycling to be grounded in a particular cyclical dynamic at the heart of Hegel’s logic and that is at its most explicit in his developmental taxonomy of judgment forms. There, the different forms of judgment are generated by a cyclical process, driven by negation, that involves an abstractive ascending phase and a reconcretizing descending phase that results in the logical complexification of the subject term of the original judgment. The subject of this new judgment form in turn initiates the following cycle, the process ending in cyclically understood syllogisms.
Hegel’s relentlessly cyclical imagery resists that of any unidirectional “ascending” movement aspiring to take thought from the actual world to some transcendent “God’s-eye view”—an imagery found in Leibniz and informing his conception of logical “analysis”. For Hegel, the cycles of philosophical thought continually return thought to the world but in such a way as to afford a deeper understanding of it.
I take this ubiquitous cycling to be grounded in a particular cyclical dynamic at the heart of Hegel’s logic and that is at its most explicit in his developmental taxonomy of judgment forms. There, the different forms of judgment are generated by a cyclical process, driven by negation, that involves an abstractive ascending phase and a reconcretizing descending phase that results in the logical complexification of the subject term of the original judgment. The subject of this new judgment form in turn initiates the following cycle, the process ending in cyclically understood syllogisms.
Hegel’s relentlessly cyclical imagery resists that of any unidirectional “ascending” movement aspiring to take thought from the actual world to some transcendent “God’s-eye view”—an imagery found in Leibniz and informing his conception of logical “analysis”. For Hegel, the cycles of philosophical thought continually return thought to the world but in such a way as to afford a deeper understanding of it.
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ABSTRACT Here, I suggest a hitherto relatively unexplored way beyond the opposed Aristotelian realist and Kantian idealist approaches that divide recent interpretations of the categories or “thought determinations” of Hegel’s Logic, by... more
ABSTRACT Here, I suggest a hitherto relatively unexplored way beyond the opposed Aristotelian realist and Kantian idealist approaches that divide recent interpretations of the categories or “thought determinations” of Hegel’s Logic, by locating his idealism within the terrain of recent debates in modal metaphysics. In particular, I return to the outlook of the first philosopher to attempt to bring Hegel into the analytic conversation, John Niemeyer Findlay, and consider Hegel’s idealism as instantiating the metaphysical position that, following the work of Findlay’s former student, Arthur Prior, has come to be called “modal actualism”.
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In his program of analytic pragmatism, Robert Brandom has presented a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of the place of analytic philosophy in the history of philosophy by linking his own non-representational ‘inferentialist’ approach to... more
In his program of analytic pragmatism, Robert Brandom has presented a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of the place of analytic philosophy in the history of philosophy by linking his own non-representational ‘inferentialist’ approach to semantics to the rationalist – idealist tradition, and in particular, to Hegel. Brandom, however, has not been without his critics in regard to both his approach to semantics and his interpretation of Hegel. Here I single out four interlinked problematic areas facing Brandom's inferentialist semantics – his approach of perceptual content, to de re attitudes, to perceptual experience and to modality, and then go on to contrast the different approach to these issues that is found in Hegel. While Hegel can helpfully be understood as anticipating an inferentialist semantics as Brandom claims, his is a weak inferentialism in contrast to Brandom's strong version. With his weakly inferentialist approach Hegel can, I suggest, be seen as providing a solution to the tangle of problems facing Brandom in these four areas.
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The problem of giving objective representations to the world was a central concern for the German idealists. Kant had secured the theoretical objectivity of world-accounts, but only at the price of omitting the existence of free rational... more
The problem of giving objective representations to the world was a central concern for the German idealists. Kant had secured the theoretical objectivity of world-accounts, but only at the price of omitting the existence of free rational beings, the acknowledgement of whom was limited to practical (moral) intentional states. But by omitting the existence of beings we are otherwise obliged to acknowledge, Kant thus denied objective theoretical knowledge of reality as such, such knowledge being limited to appearances, with an ersatz form of “objectivity” redefined as “objectively justified”. Hegel’s solution to this dilemma, I suggest, included a narrowing of the scope of metaphysics to the contents the actual world, but understood in such a way that alternate possibilities could be understood as internal to it. In this, Hegel’s position bears similarities to those of contemporary and recent “modal actualists” such as Robert Stalnaker and Arthur Prior. While Stalnaker and Prior opposed the “possibilism” of David Lewis, Hegel opposed that of Leibniz and the modified form of it found in Kant. By this means, the actualist incorporates minded beings into the (actual) world for theoretical cognition. This results in a form of idealism, but a non-worrisome form because while minded beings are thereby grasped as being parts of some possible worlds (in particular, ours), they are not assigned to all possible worlds.
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... between these two types of thing is that “the former are active, indivisible substances: ... Ibid, pp. 26–27. 36 Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807. ... Neoplatonist in character, and often... more
... between these two types of thing is that “the former are active, indivisible substances: ... Ibid, pp. 26–27. 36 Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807. ... Neoplatonist in character, and often skirted close to the type of heresy that was in the ...
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While in broad agreement with Rorty’s emphasis on the role of redescription in Hegel’s method, and with his wish to free Hegel from the constraints of traditional metaphysics, this chapter argues against Rorty’s account of Hegel’s... more
While in broad agreement with Rorty’s emphasis on the role of redescription in Hegel’s method, and with his wish to free Hegel from the constraints of traditional metaphysics, this chapter argues against Rorty’s account of Hegel’s redescriptive methodology. His account is, it suggests, tied to a misleading Sartrean interpretation of Hegel’s famous “master–slave” dialectic—an interpretation that is in fact closer to Fichte’s use of the notion of recognition than Hegel’s own. When Hegel’s concept of recognition is understood in relation to the logic of his concept of the will, a more nuanced account of recognition is achieved. This is one that coheres with a “redescription” of the task of metaphysics that portrays it as an inquiry into a modally conceived actual world. Unlike Rorty’s redescription, this is one that preserves the relevance of the value of truth and not merely that of freedom for metaphysics.
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After a period of neglect, the idealist and romantic philosophies that emerged in the wake of Kant's revolutionary writings have once more become important foci of philosophical interest, especially in relation to the question of the... more
After a period of neglect, the idealist and romantic philosophies that emerged in the wake of Kant's revolutionary writings have once more become important foci of philosophical interest, especially in relation to the question of the role of religion in human life. By developing and reinterpreting basic Kantian ideas, an array of thinkers including Schelling, Hegel, Friedrich Schlegel, Holderlin and Novalis transformed the conceptual framework within which the nature of religion could be considered. Furthermore, in doing so they significantly shaped the philosophical perspectives from within which later thinkers such as Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Wagner and Nietzsche could re-pose the question of religion. This volume explores the spaces opened during this extended period of post-Kantian thinking for a reconsideration of the place of religion within the project of human self-fashioning.
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be the ambiguity or “Janus-faced ” character of Kant’s notion of “intuition” as developed in the Critique of Pure Reason (Sellars, 1966, p. 2). Appealing first to the formal distinction between intuitions and concepts, he notes that in... more
be the ambiguity or “Janus-faced ” character of Kant’s notion of “intuition” as developed in the Critique of Pure Reason (Sellars, 1966, p. 2). Appealing first to the formal distinction between intuitions and concepts, he notes that in Kant’s taxonomy it is the generality of concepts “whether sortal or attributive, a priori or empirical ” that distinguishes them from intuitions, since “Kant thinks of intuitions as representations of individuals ” (ibid., p. 3). But this way of drawing the distinction, Sellars notes, opens up the possibility of thinking of intuitions, nevertheless, as types of concepts—that is, as “conceptual representations of individuals rather than conceptual representations of attributes or kinds ” (ibid.). Not all conceptual ways of capturing an individual can be thought of as intuitional: the phrase “the individual which is perfectly round”, for example, doesn’t capture what is for Kant the other defining feature of intuitions, their immediacy (Sellars, 1966, p...
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In this paper, I start from a criticism that John McDowell has made of the account of perception contained in Mind and World. In the essay Avoiding the Myth of the Given, he describes his earlier account as having been flawed by his... more
In this paper, I start from a criticism that John McDowell has made of the account of perception contained in Mind and World. In the essay Avoiding the Myth of the Given, he describes his earlier account as having been flawed by his having equated the idea of the conceptuality of perceptual experience with that of its propositionality. While agreeing with this criticism, I suggest that McDowell’s diagnosis of the earlier problem, as well as his suggestions for its solution, are obscured by his continuing to situate his account of perception within the predominantly epistemological framework of Mind and World. In contrast, and guided by Hegel’s account of the logic of perceptual judgment, I invoke a different function served by Kant’s idea of the “intuitive” content of perceptual experience—its modal function of indicating actual from merely possible states of affairs. Comparing Hegel’s metaphysical position to that of contemporary modal actualists, I argue that by transforming Kant’...
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CONTINENTAL IDEALISM Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess philosophers after him in light of their responses to Kantian idealism. In Continental Idealism, Paul Redding argues that the... more
CONTINENTAL IDEALISM Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess philosophers after him in light of their responses to Kantian idealism. In Continental Idealism, Paul Redding argues that the story of German idealism ...
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Kierkegaard wrote in his journal: ‘If Hegel had written his entire Logic and said in the preface that it is merely a thought experiment, ... he would be the greatest thinker who ever lived. As it is, he is comical’ (1996: 182). While I... more
Kierkegaard wrote in his journal: ‘If Hegel had written his entire Logic and said in the preface that it is merely a thought experiment, ... he would be the greatest thinker who ever lived. As it is, he is comical’ (1996: 182). While I cannot second Kierkegaard’s statement, it hits on a very real problem that haunts scholarship of Hegel’s Science of Logic: it seems very hard to interpret the text as being about anything other than itself. If one takes Hegel’s own ambitious claims about his Logic seriously, that it represents a metaphysical system, a combination of epistemic method and ontological explanation of the nature of reality, as well as a cornerstone to the rest of of his philosophical system, then the sheer ambition of the work seems to put it outside of the domain of the modern worldview. Most efforts to interpret Hegel’s philosophy in line with some more recent school of thought stop short of endorsing Hegel’s mission statement for the Science of Logic. On the other hand, many of the finest commentaries on Hegel’s Logic get so caught in the incredible complexity of the details in the text that they struggle to remain relevant to broader philosophical debates. Rocío Zambrana’s Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility represents a bold attempt to interpret Hegel’s Logic as being about more than itself. In her interpretation, the Logic represents a philosophical deduction of normative concepts that we use to make sense of reality. The main lesson of Hegel’s ‘theory of intelligibility’ is that our grasp of reality is mediated by concepts that are marked by ‘normative ambivalence and historical precarity’. The virtue of this reading is that it places Hegel’s Logic at the crossroads of two powerful interpretations of how Hegel’s philosophy could be relevant: Pippin’s understanding of Hegel’s theory of modernity as an intersubjective way of justifying ethical norms; and continental readings that focus on how Hegel undermines claims of absolute truth. Zambrana works to show that Hegel’s Logic allows us to make sense of how our normative concepts are shot through with ambivalence and precariousness. However, there is a price to be paid for reading Hegel’s Science of Logic as a theory of intelligibility. The reading must disregard many of Hegel’s own claims about how he intended the Logic to be understood, and in the course of her argument, Zambrana often supports her thesis by imposing a frame on Hegel’s doi:10.1017/hgl.2016.59 Hegel Bulletin © The Hegel Society of Great Britain, 2016 , 40/2, 316–320
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In his recent book James Kreines argues that for Hegel reason is “in the world”, but how we are to understand the idea of reason's being so located”? One answer, suggested by more traditional theocentric readings of Hegel, would be to... more
In his recent book James Kreines argues that for Hegel reason is “in the world”, but how we are to understand the idea of reason's being so located”? One answer, suggested by more traditional theocentric readings of Hegel, would be to appeal to the idea of a divine thought, coursing through the world. Another answer, more congenial to modern sensibilities, might locate reason within the rational activities of inter-subjectively connected human beings, as suggested by Terry Pinkard's idea of the “sociality of reason”. Kreines seems to want to avoid suggestions of the former, but in distancing himself from approaches like the latter, he also seems to refuse the more metaphysically modest alternative. In retracing the contours of Kreines's nuanced attempt to reinflate Hegel's metaphysics as a “metaphysics of reason”, I pose the question as to whether he can avoid reintroducing a more extravagantly metaphysical Hegel than he wishes.
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Stanley Rosen’s The Idea of Hegel’s Science of Logic is a follow up to his book on Hegel published almost four decades earlier, G. W. F. Hegel: The Science of Wisdom (Rosen 1974). Moreover, unless he has left something further that is... more
Stanley Rosen’s The Idea of Hegel’s Science of Logic is a follow up to his book on Hegel published almost four decades earlier, G. W. F. Hegel: The Science of Wisdom (Rosen 1974). Moreover, unless he has left something further that is unpublished, this will be his last word on Hegel as, sadly, Rosen died within six months of its publication. In the earlier book Rosen had described Hegel as ‘first and foremost a logician’ rather than ‘a philosopher of history, a political thinker, a theologian, or a Lebensphilosoph’ (1974: xiii). The new book might indeed be read as the eventual expansion of this original suggestion, although his assessment of the success of the project has changed: Rosen now seems more convinced of the success of Hegel’s science. As in the earlier work, Rosen presents Hegel in the context of a history of philosophy, book-ended by Parmenides and the problem of the one and the many and, at the other end, the state of contemporary philosophy diagnosed as essentially nihilistic. The theme of nihilism, with its origins deep in the Socratic-rationalist philosophical project, had been a recurring theme from the time of Rosen’s earliest work (Rosen 1969). Its presence here signals the importance attached to the figure of Hegel, for Hegel had insisted, and Rosen adds, ‘not entirely without reason’, that ‘if we repudiate his enterprise we are doomed to the nihilism of multiple and mutually partial views, perspectives, interpretations, or opinions about human life’ (72). Rosen’s approach to Hegel had been influenced by a range of thinkers from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève, and in this work he continues to defend Hegel against his ‘left Hegelian’ interpreters, whom he takes to reduce Hegel’s philosophy to ‘philosophical anthropology and the philosophy of history, including political and sociological theory’ (163). But Rosen’s interpretative positioning of Hegel never really gets expressed in a more than general way. Indeed, one gets from The Idea of Hegel’s Science of Logic no sense of what has transpired in the field of Hegel interpretation since the appearance of the original book. Apart from a handful of oblique references, there is essentially no attempt to engage with any recent secondary work on Hegel’s logic in any language. Rosen makes it clear that this is a consciously adopted strategy (4). Part of its justification is that an engagement with the secondary literature would make it a work only relevant for Hegel specialists, but I believe that doi:10.1017/hgl.2016.46 Hegel Bulletin, 39/2, 366–371 © The Hegel Society of Great Britain, 2016
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We reconstruct Hegel's implicit version of the ontological argument in the light of his anti-representationalist idealist metaphysics. For Hegel, the ontological argument had been a peculiarly modern form of argument for the existence... more
We reconstruct Hegel's implicit version of the ontological argument in the light of his anti-representationalist idealist metaphysics. For Hegel, the ontological argument had been a peculiarly modern form of argument for the existence of God, presupposing a ‘representationalist’ account of the mind and its concepts. As such, it was susceptible to Kant's famous refutation, but Kant himself had provided a model for an alternative conception ofconcept, one developed by Fichte with his notion of the I=I. We reconstruct an Hegelian version of the ontological argument by considering the possibility of aFichteanversion, and then subjectingitto a critique based on Hegel's critical appropriation of Fichte's I=I.
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Far too often Hegel interpreters reject attempts to situate Hegel’s logic in relation to modern movements: Hegel’s criticisms of the logic of “the mere understanding” is somehow assumed to render irrelevant anything counting as “logic”... more
Far too often Hegel interpreters reject attempts to situate Hegel’s logic in relation to modern movements: Hegel’s criticisms of the logic of “the mere understanding” is somehow assumed to render irrelevant anything counting as “logic” from the modern period. Contesting this assumption, it is here argued that the natural home of Hegel’s subjective logic as presented in Book III of The Science of Logic, is the type of algebraic transformation of Aristotle, started by Boole in the mid-nineteenth century, continued by Peirce and others later in the century, but also anticipated by Leibniz in the seventeenth and Hegel’s effective own logic teacher, Gottfried Ploucquet, in the eighteenth. Moreover, Hegel addressed the criticism that Frege would aim at Boole, that he was unable to find any “organic relation” between class and propositional calculi that stood rather as “mirror images” to each other. Hegel, it is argued, had offered a solution to the same problem in Leibniz, that involved a dynamic hybrid of both kinds of logic. This would give to his logic some of the features found in intuitionist challenges to classical logic, including Boolean logic, in the twentieth century, especially with respect to the Law of Excluded Middle.
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While in his Science of Logic, Hegel employed neither diagrams nor formulae, his reinterpretation of Aristotle’s syllogistic logic in the “Subjective Logic” of Book III strongly suggests a diagrammatic dimension. Significantly, an early... more
While in his Science of Logic, Hegel employed neither diagrams nor formulae, his reinterpretation of Aristotle’s syllogistic logic in the “Subjective Logic” of Book III strongly suggests a diagrammatic dimension. Significantly, an early diagram depicting a “triangle of triangles” found among his papers after his death captures the organization of categories to be found in The Science of Logic. Features of this diagram help us understand Hegel’s logical project as an attempt to retrieve features of Plato’s thinking that are implicit within Aristotle’s syllogistic logic. It is argued that parallels between Hegel’s modification of Aristotle’s syllogistic figures and Peirce’s functional alignment of those syllogistic figures with his three inference forms—deduction, induction, and abduction—suggest modifications of the traditional “square of opposition” into a logical hexagon as found in recent discussions. However, Hegel had conceived of Aristotle’s syllogism as a distorted version of ...
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... between these two types of thing is that “the former are active, indivisible substances: ... Ibid, pp. 26–27. 36 Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807. ... Neoplatonist in character, and often... more
... between these two types of thing is that “the former are active, indivisible substances: ... Ibid, pp. 26–27. 36 Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807. ... Neoplatonist in character, and often skirted close to the type of heresy that was in the ...
This chapter examines and assesses the purported “neo-Hegelianism” of a version of pragmatism that developed within analytic philosophy, a context otherwise generally antipathetic to the philosophy of Hegel. In particular, it looks to the... more
This chapter examines and assesses the purported “neo-Hegelianism” of a version of pragmatism that developed within analytic philosophy, a context otherwise generally antipathetic to the philosophy of Hegel. In particular, it looks to the work of Robert Brandom and John McDowell who were influenced by the Pittsburgh philosopher Wilfrid Sellars and it examines the mediating role played by Richard Rorty in the development of this “Pittsburgh” neo-Hegelianism. In particular, Rorty believed that Sellars’s approach had to be freed from the scientific-realist assumptions common to analytic philosophy that had limited the pragmatist and Hegelian dimensions of his work.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Interpreters disagree over whether the categories or “thought determinations” of Hegel’s Objective Logic should be construed as, following Aristotle, fundamentally about being, or, following Kant, fundamentally about thought. Moreover,... more
Interpreters disagree over whether the categories or “thought determinations” of Hegel’s Objective Logic should be construed as, following Aristotle, fundamentally about being, or, following Kant, fundamentally about thought. Moreover, they disagree over the relation that Objective Logic stands to Subjective Logic, which inturn involves its own transition to “objectivity”. This paper focuses on Hegel’s Subjective Logic as charting a process in which a logic initially understood as subjective and formal, after the manner of Kant, comes to acquire content, issuing in a type of unity of thought and being of which the earlier Objective Logic was incapable. In particular, Hegel’s account of judgment and syllogism can be read as a critical reinterpretation of the logic governing the passage from experience to “ideas” in Aristotle’s account of epagoge or “induction”.
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In the second half of the twentieth century, the topic of modality, while earlier ignored within analytic philosophy, made a striking return. This new environment, I suggest, has allowed Hegel’s distinctive metaphysics to come more... more
In the second half of the twentieth century, the topic of modality, while earlier ignored within analytic philosophy, made a striking return. This new environment, I suggest, has allowed Hegel’s distinctive metaphysics to come more clearly into view, in that his idealism can be seen as having features in common with recent “actualist” alternatives to David Lewis’s “modal realism.” Here it may be significant that Arthur Prior, an early proponent of modal actualism, had been influenced by his teacher, the Hegelian philosopher John Findlay.
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Towards the end of the Eighteenth Century, hermeneutic thought in Germany developed in close proximity to the emerging “idealist” and “romantic” philosophical movements inspired by the “critical philosophy” of Immanuel Kant. Crucially... more
Towards the end of the Eighteenth Century, hermeneutic thought in Germany developed in close proximity to the emerging “idealist” and “romantic” philosophical movements inspired by the “critical philosophy” of Immanuel Kant. Crucially this was a time that witnessed the growth of interest in the structure of national languages and literatures, and the question was soon posed as to the relation between what Kant had postulated as the a priori structure governing an individual’s experience and thought and the structure of the actual language that that individual had assimilated from their cultural tradition. This essay examines the emergence of the strong language-dependence thesis in the approach of the early hermeneutic thinkers Hamann and Herder, and their use of this idea to criticise the “purism” of Kantian thought. It then follows the ensuing response by Kant and his followers, especially Fichte and Hegel, as the latter attempted to bring a linguistic dimension to a Kantian inspired idealism. The issue of the relation of thought to language that was at the heart of this complexly developing debate has continued to be of philosophical concern up to the present.
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The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each could carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that fabled place... more
The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each could carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that fabled place ‘beyond hypotheses’. There seemed to be nothing like a neutral standpoint from which these alternative first principles could be evaluated. But if there were no such standpoint, then the whole idea of ‘rational certainty’ and the whole SocraticPlatonic idea of replacing passion by reason, seemed not to make much sense. (Rorty, 1999, 10)
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Since having been dismissed by Bertrand Russell in the early twentieth century, Hegel has rarely been considered as having views relevant for the core logical and metaphysical concerns of analytic philosophy. According to Russell, Hegel... more
Since having been dismissed by Bertrand Russell in the early twentieth century, Hegel has rarely been considered as having views relevant for the core logical and metaphysical concerns of analytic philosophy. According to Russell, Hegel had an antiquated metaphysics that derived from a naïve acceptance of Aristotle’s subject–predicate conception of judgment—an approach that had been made redundant by the revolutionary work in logic by Frege. However, the grounds invoked by Russell for Hegel’s excommunication came into question when philosophers and logicians re-engaged with modal issues from the 1960s. For example, Aristotle once again came to be taken seriously by those anxious to avoid what they saw as the unwanted metaphysical consequences of Russellian extensionalism in logic when applied to modal logic. Hegel’s views, however, have never been reexamined in a similar way. In this paper I argue that in his account of judgment in his Science of Logic Hegel offers an approach that is very different to that as portrayed by Russell. In particular, it is an approach that offers novel ways of thinking about puzzling issues concerning the logical treatment of tense and modality—topics that have become central to mainstream debates.
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form the principle of legal status, an independence that lacks the
The understanding of Hegel's metaphysics that is here argued for—that it is a metaphysics of the actual world—may sound trivial or empty. To counter this, in part one the actualist reading of Hegel's idealism is opposed to two... more
The understanding of Hegel's metaphysics that is here argued for—that it is a metaphysics of the actual world—may sound trivial or empty. To counter this, in part one the actualist reading of Hegel's idealism is opposed to two other currently popular interpretations, those of the naturalist and the conceptual realist respectively. While actualism shares motivations with each of these positions, it is argued that it is better equipped to capture what both aim to bring out in Hegel's metaphysics, but also better able to resist criticisms of each of these opposed positions made from the viewpoint of the other. Like the conceptual realist, the actualist wants to affirm the objectivity of concepts in the world—an idea that can seem antithetical to the naturalist. While the position of “liberal naturalism” makes concessions to such a position, this feature is more easily accommodated by the actualist. However, like the liberal naturalist, the actualist is also suspicious of an...
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Richard Rorty stands as the paradigm of the “post-analytic” philosopher, or, to put it in his own terms, of the “ambidextrous” philosopher, capable of bringing technical developments in twentieth-century analytic philosophy together with... more
Richard Rorty stands as the paradigm of the “post-analytic” philosopher, or, to put it in his own terms, of the “ambidextrous” philosopher, capable of bringing technical developments in twentieth-century analytic philosophy together with broader philosophical concerns stemming from the idealist tradition of the nineteenth century—a tradition with which “analysis” was meant to have definitively broken. In this essay it is argued that despite his attempts to fashion a neo-Hegelian historicist alternative to analytic philosophy—one fitting a conception of philosophy as “conversation” rather than the representation of reality—Rorty’s alternative is shaped by assumptions deriving from the analytic tradition with which he was trying to break.
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Agreeing with Sally Sedgwick’s claim that Hegel’s “empty formalism” critique of Kant’s philosophy can only be understood against the background of Hegel’s broader critique of Kant’s account of reason, I here attempt to ground both... more
Agreeing with Sally Sedgwick’s claim that Hegel’s “empty formalism” critique of Kant’s philosophy can only be understood against the background of Hegel’s broader critique of Kant’s account of reason, I here attempt to ground both critiques in an interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics that I develop from the work of John N. Findlay in which Hegel’s idealism is interpreted as a form of the “modal actualism” attributed to Findlay’s student, the modal logician Arthur Prior. Just as Prior’s actualism was directed against the possibilism of David Lewis, Hegel’s was directed against that of Leibniz as well as the Leibnizian features of Kant’s practical philosophy.
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The problem of giving objective representations to the world was a central concern for the German idealists. Kant had secured the theoretical objectivity of world-accounts, but only at the price of omitting the existence of free rational... more
The problem of giving objective representations to the world was a central concern for the German idealists. Kant had secured the theoretical objectivity of world-accounts, but only at the price of omitting the existence of free rational beings, the acknowledgement of whom was limited to practical (moral) intentional states. But by omitting the existence of beings we are otherwise obliged to acknowledge, Kant thus denied objective theoretical knowledge of reality as such, such knowledge being limited to appearances, with an ersatz form of “objectivity” redefined as “objectively justified”. Hegel’s solution to this dilemma, I suggest, included a narrowing of the scope of metaphysics to the contents the actual world, but understood in such a way that alternate possibilities could be understood as internal to it. In this, Hegel’s position bears similarities to those of contemporary and recent “modal actualists” such as Robert Stalnaker and Arthur Prior. While Stalnaker and Prior opposed the “possibilism” of David Lewis, Hegel opposed that of Leibniz and the modified form of it found in Kant. By this means, the actualist incorporates minded beings into the (actual) world for theoretical cognition. This results in a form of idealism, but a non-worrisome form because while minded beings are thereby grasped as being parts of some possible worlds (in particular, ours), they are not assigned to all possible worlds.
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Click title above for a short video on the contents of the book Conceptual Harmonies: The Origins and Relevance of Hegel's Logic