I 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. Supervisors: Bill Bonney; John Burnheim; George Markus
This five-minute video was a contribution (one of fifty) to a project organized by Thomas Mayer a... more This five-minute video was a contribution (one of fifty) to a project organized by Thomas Mayer and Tobias Rosefeldt (Humboldt University of Berlin) and Dina Emundts (Free University of Berlin) to celebrate Hegel's 250th birthday. All 50 five-minute videos can be viewed at <https://5minutenhegel.de/>. In this contribution I suggest that Hegel was alert to the origins of logic in the musical theories of Pythagorean contemporaries of Plato and Aristotle.
This book examines the possibilities for the rehabilitation of Hegelian thought within current an... 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.
Conceptual Harmonies develops an original account of G. W. F. Hegel’s perplexing 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.
An advance on recent revisionist thinking about Hegelian philosophy, this book interprets Hegel’s... 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.
Most attempts to trace the roots of current scientific approaches to the mind have ignored the co... 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 co... 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.
Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess philos... 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.
BLURB: Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess... 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.
After a period of neglect, the idealist and romantic philosophies that emerged in the wake of Kan... 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.
This book examines the possibilities for the rehabilitation of Hegelian thought within current an... 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... 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... 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.
After a period of neglect, the idealist and romantic philosophies that emerged in the wake of Kan... 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.
While Hegel is generally not known as a philosopher of mathematics, he maintained a deep interest... more While Hegel is generally not known as a philosopher of mathematics, he maintained a deep interest in the history of mathematics, especially in its transformations between antiquity and the modern age. Charles S. Peirce, who was the son of a distinguished mathematician and was involved in developments in mathematics in the second half of the nineteenth century, was critical of what he perceived as Hegel’s lack of mathematical acumen. Nevertheless, he recognized in Hegel’s Science of Logic, structural features of his own mathematically informed philosophy. In this paper I look to Hegel’s discussion of magnitude in The Science of Logic, and especially to his conception of the relation between continuous and discrete magnitudes, in order to articulate a solution he might offer to difficulties encountered by Peirce in his opposition to Cantor’s set-theoretical analysis of the continuum. It is argued that Hegel’s interest in the ancient Platonic/Pythagorean tradition in mathematics provided him with crucial resources in this regard.
In this paper, I approach Hegel’s philosophy under the banner of a “Keplerian Revolution”, the i... 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
In this paper I return to the familiar territory of the Lord-Bondsman "dialectic" in Hegel's Phen... 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.
Recently, historians have discussed the relevance of the nineteenth-century mathematical discipli... 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.
Hegel interpreters commonly reject attempts to situate Hegel’s logic
in relation to modern moveme... 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
This article examines a convergence between approaches to practical reason in the logics of Arist... 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.
This five-minute video was a contribution (one of fifty) to a project organized by Thomas Mayer a... more This five-minute video was a contribution (one of fifty) to a project organized by Thomas Mayer and Tobias Rosefeldt (Humboldt University of Berlin) and Dina Emundts (Free University of Berlin) to celebrate Hegel's 250th birthday. All 50 five-minute videos can be viewed at <https://5minutenhegel.de/>. In this contribution I suggest that Hegel was alert to the origins of logic in the musical theories of Pythagorean contemporaries of Plato and Aristotle.
This book examines the possibilities for the rehabilitation of Hegelian thought within current an... 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.
Conceptual Harmonies develops an original account of G. W. F. Hegel’s perplexing 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.
An advance on recent revisionist thinking about Hegelian philosophy, this book interprets Hegel’s... 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.
Most attempts to trace the roots of current scientific approaches to the mind have ignored the co... 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 co... 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.
Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess philos... 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.
BLURB: Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess... 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.
After a period of neglect, the idealist and romantic philosophies that emerged in the wake of Kan... 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.
This book examines the possibilities for the rehabilitation of Hegelian thought within current an... 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... 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... 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.
After a period of neglect, the idealist and romantic philosophies that emerged in the wake of Kan... 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.
While Hegel is generally not known as a philosopher of mathematics, he maintained a deep interest... more While Hegel is generally not known as a philosopher of mathematics, he maintained a deep interest in the history of mathematics, especially in its transformations between antiquity and the modern age. Charles S. Peirce, who was the son of a distinguished mathematician and was involved in developments in mathematics in the second half of the nineteenth century, was critical of what he perceived as Hegel’s lack of mathematical acumen. Nevertheless, he recognized in Hegel’s Science of Logic, structural features of his own mathematically informed philosophy. In this paper I look to Hegel’s discussion of magnitude in The Science of Logic, and especially to his conception of the relation between continuous and discrete magnitudes, in order to articulate a solution he might offer to difficulties encountered by Peirce in his opposition to Cantor’s set-theoretical analysis of the continuum. It is argued that Hegel’s interest in the ancient Platonic/Pythagorean tradition in mathematics provided him with crucial resources in this regard.
In this paper, I approach Hegel’s philosophy under the banner of a “Keplerian Revolution”, the i... 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
In this paper I return to the familiar territory of the Lord-Bondsman "dialectic" in Hegel's Phen... 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.
Recently, historians have discussed the relevance of the nineteenth-century mathematical discipli... 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.
Hegel interpreters commonly reject attempts to situate Hegel’s logic
in relation to modern moveme... 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
This article examines a convergence between approaches to practical reason in the logics of Arist... 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.
While in his Science of Logic, Hegel employed neither diagrams nor formulae, his reinterpretation... 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.
This paper gives a brief sketch of Gyo¨rgy Markus’s philosophical style as manifest in the
conte... 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
This is an introductory essay to Australiasian Philosophical Review, vol. 2, number 2, devoted to... more This is an introductory essay to Australiasian Philosophical Review, vol. 2, number 2, devoted to the Hegel interpretation of Robert Pippin.
Here I argue for a particular interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics and against two rival interpr... 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.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit provides a fascinating picture of individual minds caught up in r... 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.
International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2019
Here, I pursue consequences, for the interpretation of Sellars’s critique of the “Myth of the Giv... 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.
Dina Edmunts and Sally Sedgwick (eds), Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus, vol. 12: Logic., 2017
Interpreters disagree over whether the categories or “thought determinations” of Hegel’s Objectiv... 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”.
International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Jan 30, 2017
In her latest book Danielle Macbeth has embarked on a project that, in its ambitious attempt to c... 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
The second half of the Twentieth Century witnessed a number of attempts to rehabilitate Hegel wit... 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”.
For many recent readers of Hegel, Wilfrid Sellars’s 1956 London lectures on the “Myth of the Give... 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.
Habermasian pragmatics Pragmatics plays a multi-dimensional role in Jfirgen Habermas's recent rec... 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
To appear in James Conant and Jonas Held (eds),, fhe Palgrave Handbook of German ldealism and Analytic philosophy, 2024
A paradox generated by Robert Pippin's approach to interpreting Hegel's "science of pure thinking... 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.
The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism, Mario de Caro and David Macarthur (eds), Routledge, 2022
It is argued that the features of a “liberal naturalism” as sought by advocates of that approach ... 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.
Ideas and Idealism in Philosophy, Jure Simonity and Gregor Kroupa, eds., De Gruyter., 2022
In this paper I argue for an interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy beyond a choice between two dis... 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”.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Critical Perspectives on Freedom and History, Dean Moyar, Kate Padgett-Walsh and Sebastian Rand (eds), Routledge, 2023. , 2022
Over the last decade, Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard have stressed various Aristotelian features... 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.
Marina F. Bykova and Kenneth R. Westphal (eds), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), 2020
After a sustained period in which the enterprise of metaphysics was negatively regarded, metaphys... more After a sustained period in which the enterprise of metaphysics was negatively regarded, metaphysical topics have for some time been back in favour with analytic philosophers. The highpoint of analytic philosophy's anti-metaphysical period had been in the 1930s and 40s when the logical positivists used a verificationalist criterion for meaningfulness (a claim is meaningful only if it can be either empirically verified or disconfirmed) to dismiss traditional "metaphysical" discourse as meaningless. However, the verificationalist criterion soon came to be regarded as self-defeating: clearly it was not itself capable of empirical verification or disconfirmation. Another turn taken by analytic philosophy around the same time would continue this antimetaphysical impulse without relying upon the positivists' self-refuting principle, "ordinary language" philosophers shifting the criteria for meaningfulness more to the "ordinary" uses of language. While in comparison to the 30s and 40s, the very early years of analytic philosophy had seemed comparatively "metaphysical", the seeds for the ultimate rejection of metaphysics are not difficult to discern there. 1 While in no sense opposed to the project of metaphysics per se, the attitudes of expressed by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at the turn of the twentieth century had been opposed a particular type of metaphysics-broadly the type of "British idealism" influential in the last decades of the 19 th century. Nevertheless, the more general anti-metaphysical orientation that was to develop latter might be seen as deriving from the weapons that had been employed by Russell in his war against the idealists-weapons supplied by the new logic stemming from work of Gottlob Frege on the logical foundations of mathematics.
Paul Giladi (ed) Responses to Naturalism: Critical Perspectives from Idealism and Pragmatism, 2019
The reasons why philosophers with a this-worldly bent reject idealism are obvious enough. Idealis... 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.
Jakub Mácha and Alexander Berg (eds) Wittgenstein and Hegel: Reevaluation of Difference (DeGruyter), 2019
Parallels are often drawn between Hegel and the later Wittgenstein, but
an examination of Hegel’... 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.
The problem of giving objective representations to the world was a central concern for the German... 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.
James Gledhill and Sebastian Stein (eds), Hegel and Contemporary Practical Philosophy, Routledge, 2020
Agreeing with Sally Sedgwick’s claim that Hegel’s “empty formalism” critique of Kant’s philosophy... 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.
in: Marina Bykova (ed.) Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press) , 2019
The categorical structures of Hegel’s Logic, which forms the first part of the systematic Encyclo... 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.
Michael Forster and Kristen Gjesdal (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Hermeneutics, (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2018)., 2019
Towards the end of the Eighteenth Century, hermeneutic thought in Germany developed in close prox... 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.
The Act and Object of Judgment, edited by Brian Ball and Christoph Schuringa (Routledge), 2019
Since having been dismissed by Bertrand Russell in the early twentieth century, Hegel has rarely ... 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.
Thom Brooks and Sebastian Stein (eds), Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: On the Normative significance of Method and System, Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2017., 2017
It might be thought paradoxical that Richard Rorty, a philosopher with a deep distrust of metaphy... 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.
Patrick J. Reider (ed.), Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism and Realism (Bloomsbury 2017)
In Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind [EPM], as part of his critique of the empiricist ‘myth’ conc... 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.
Rachel Zuckert and James Kreines (eds) Hegel on Philosophy in History (Cambridge University Press), 2017
For many readers of Hegel in the twentieth century, and following the interpretation given by Ale... 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 implying that ambivalence must always be irrational. Again, even where emotional inconsistency... more as implying that ambivalence must always be irrational. Again, even where emotional inconsistency might be viewed as a failure of some kind, it is not clear that it is best understood as a failure of rationality. As Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson point out in a later essay on sentimentalism (pp. 598-605), emotional responses can be affected by a range of extraneous factors: emotions may be damped down by depression or jumpstarted by emotional contagion, and the result may well be a clash with the subject's evaluative perspective overall. Yet a parent who fails to love a new baby due to depression is not obviously irrational. This kind of case might be thought to cast doubt on Helm's suggestion that our judgements can commit us to having certain kinds of emotions in certain kinds of situation (p. 319).
International Journal of Philosophical Studies, forthcoming, 2017., 2017
In her latest book Danielle Macbeth has embarked on a project that, in its ambitious attempt to c... 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
as implying that ambivalence must always be irrational. Again, even where emotional inconsistency... more as implying that ambivalence must always be irrational. Again, even where emotional inconsistency might be viewed as a failure of some kind, it is not clear that it is best understood as a failure of rationality. As Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson point out in a later essay on sentimentalism (pp. 598-605), emotional responses can be affected by a range of extraneous factors: emotions may be damped down by depression or jumpstarted by emotional contagion, and the result may well be a clash with the subject's evaluative perspective overall. Yet a parent who fails to love a new baby due to depression is not obviously irrational. This kind of case might be thought to cast doubt on Helm's suggestion that our judgements can commit us to having certain kinds of emotions in certain kinds of situation (p. 319).
In Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution, Rebecca Comay brings together the figures ... 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.
While for many of his readers in the nineteenth century Hegel seemed to have offered a viable sys... 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 ...
T HE disjointed, dadaesque figure that sulks from the cover of Paul Griitiths' book threatens tha... more T HE disjointed, dadaesque figure that sulks from the cover of Paul Griitiths' book threatens that disturbing revelations lie within. And indeed, Griffiths insists as a result of his investigation that emotions are not what we think they are. As this is surely the most comprehensive and up to date survey of the field, we have good reason to take his conclusion seriously.
Aristotle is often looked to as providing a potentially appropriate model for a naturalistic huma... more Aristotle is often looked to as providing a potentially appropriate model for a naturalistic human psychology that is able to reconcile the commonly opposed normative or "manifest" and factual or "scientific" images of the world. In contrast, this paper argues for the greater relevance of Plato's comparatively neglected approach, exploring this in the context of a psychophysics of colour perception-a topic still resistant to formalization in modern science. While Plato's natural philosophy is often dismissed as caught up in a fanciful pre-scientific approach based on the "harmonies" of Pythagorean music theory (the so-called "music of the spheres"), it is argued that such Pythagorean harmony theory had actually provided Plato with the rudiments of contemporary mathematical tools useful for the study of colour phenomena, tools such as projective geometry, linear algebra, algebraic topology, and graph theory. It is argued that Plato's approach to the psychophysics of colour underlies the colour phenomena discovered by Goethe in the nineteenth century, phenomena that are consistent with modern mathematical analyses of order. It is Plato, not Aristotle, whose work is suggestive of a successful psychophysical approach to colour.
This paper reconstructs a Hegelian response to the charge that the Greek heritage of modern weste... 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.
The Section “Magnitude (Quantity)” in Book I of Hegel’s Science of Logic might be regarded as con... 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.
Hegel has commonly been ridiculed for views expressed in his 1801 dissertation, On the Orbits of ... 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.
A paradox generated by Robert Pippin’s approach to interpreting Hegel’s “science of pure thinking... 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.
Both Hegel and Wittgenstein were attracted to Goethe’s colour theory, but, I argue, not for the r... 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.
With his project of a universal characteristic, Leibniz is commonly seen as a precursor to modern... 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.
Early in the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel describes the “whole of philosophy” as resembling a “circ... 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.
Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses. Bd. I: Hauptvorträge. Bd. II: Sektionen I-V. Bd. III: Sektionen VI-X: Bd. IV: Sektionen XI-XIV. Bd. V: Sektionen XV-XVIII, 2000
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant was concerned to show how it is that finite minds could objec... more In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant was concerned to show how it is that finite minds could objectively represent the world, and he did this by inquiring into those conditions which enabled this achievement. But a characteristic aspect of his approach involved reinterpreting the idea of what it was that could be achieved. In short, he
ABSTRACT Here, I suggest a hitherto relatively unexplored way beyond the opposed Aristotelian rea... 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”.
In a paper from 1995, "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright", Richar... more In a paper from 1995, "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright", Richard Rorty criticizes Wright's appeal to the notion of "truth makers"-a notion that involves precisely the sort conflation of causal and justificatory relations that Rorty, following Sellars, wants to keep distinct. Here, however, he appeals to a criticism that reaches back through Davidson to Peter Strawson. "One of Davidson's reasons for having no truck with the idea of 'truth makers'", Rorty notes, "is his hunch that only completely artificial objects called 'facts'-what Strawson sneeringly called 'sentence-shaped objects'-can meet Wright's needs". 1 More recently, this issue of the status of "facts" has recurred in the context of another engagement, however this time with Rorty's fellow pragmatist and supporter, Robert Brandom, in the context of Brandom's otherwise strongly affirmative construal of Rorty's own form of pragmatism. 2 In "Vocabularies of Pragmatism", Brandom describes Rorty's master strategy in his 1979 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature as his having used "a Kantian conceptual tool to undermine a (broadly) Kantian representationalist picture". 3 The tool in question is just the Sellarsian one mentioned above of insisting on "the distinction between causal considerations and justificatory considerations". 4 This strategy is Kantian in the sense of the strategy that Kant had used against Locke, but in Rorty it is expressed in linguistic form as the claim "that inferential or justificatory relations obtain only between items within a vocabulary," while in contrast, "relations between applications of a vocabulary and the environing world of things that are not applications of a vocabulary must be understood exclusively in nonnormative causal terms". In short: "Normative relations are exclusively intravocabulary. Extravocabulary relations are exclusively causal". 5 To this point Brandom's presentation has been entirely affirmative. However, he now claims that Rorty unnecessarily muddies the waters by rejecting "the idea of facts as a kind of thing that makes claims true". 6 Quoting Rorty that "since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths", 7 Brandom adds: "I think at this point something has gone wrong with [Rorty's] argument". 8 Brandom claims that one can hold the causal and normative realms distinct, and yet nevertheless affirm that there were facts prior to the existence of claimmaking, vocabulary-employing humans. We can "understand facts as true claims,
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Dec 6, 2014
In his program of analytic pragmatism, Robert Brandom has presented a thoroughgoing reinterpretat... 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.
The problem of giving objective representations to the world was a central concern for the German... 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.
... between these two types of thing is that “the former are active, indivisible substances: ... ... 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 ...
In contrast with the empiricist tradition, German idealism and American pragmatism shared a tende... more In contrast with the empiricist tradition, German idealism and American pragmatism shared a tendency to treat aesthetic judgment as the exemplar of judgment per se. In each case, I suggest, this was motivated by much the same reasons-aesthetic judgment was seen as central to an understanding of how judgment could be both based in the responses of the body to its environment on the one hand, and yet have some type of trans-subjective, normative, and hence "ideal" content, on the other. 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" dimension of aesthetic judgments typically rendered them problematic in comparison with more straightforward perceptual ones, such as judgments of color. James, however, was able to restore to aesthetic judgment a type of objectivity, based on the idea of "aesthetic" qualities as having real effects on the physiologically grounded emotional reactions of perceiving subjects. Regarded from such a point of view, aesthetic judgments lose their peripheral status and instead are able to be thought of as prototypical of judging in general. Against this Jamesian background, I argue that elements of a similarly somatically focused approach can be seen as implicit in Hegel's account of judgment in the Science of Logic, an account within which Hegel, too, raised aesthetic judgment to prototypical status. Such a focus on embodiment, particularly on the role of the outwardly directed
While in broad agreement with Rorty’s emphasis on the role of redescription in Hegel’s method, an... 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.
European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Mar 21, 2012
This paper examines Hegel's claim that philosophy "has no other object than God" as a claim about... 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".
After a period of neglect, the idealist and romantic philosophies that emerged in the wake of Kan... 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.
While professional philosophy as practiced in the English-speaking world over the last hundred ye... more While professional philosophy as practiced in the English-speaking world over the last hundred years has, for the most part, been hostile to Hegel and "German idealism", exceptions are to be found within the American "pragmatist" tradition. Among the founders of pragmatism, strongly Hegelian themes can be found in the work of John Dewey (1859-1952), George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) and, to some extent, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). By the mid-twentieth century, however, the influence of "classical" pragmatism within philosophy had waned, while the "analytic" approach to philosophy, traceable back to founding figures such as Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, was becoming institutionally dominant within most of the English-speaking world. Analytic philosophy had started as a reaction against Hegelianism, and so Hegel's influence might have seemed to have come to an end, but recently a generally more favourable orientation towards Hegel's philosophy has once again emerged within the type of "analytic pragmatism" associated with the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (1912-89). Sellars himself had been at best ambivalent towards Hegel, and aligned his own philosophy more with the approach of Kant whose "transcendental idealism" he tried to give a "scientific realist" twist. 1 Among his followers, however, Richard Rorty attempted to promote the discernible "Hegelian" dimension of Sellars's work and extract this from Sellars's "realist" aspirations, that he criticized in ways drawing on the earlier pragmatism of William James. 2 In turn, Robert Brandom, deeply influenced by Rorty, has developed Sellars's ideas in a way that could be used to reconstruct a more systematic interpretation of Hegel from an "social pragmatist" point of view. 3 Such pragmatic versions of Hegel have been criticized by "mainstream" interpreters of Hegel, and the question of what relation-if any-exists between Hegel's philosophy and that of the pragmatists will probably be debated 1
be the ambiguity or “Janus-faced ” character of Kant’s notion of “intuition” as developed in the ... 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...
In this paper, I start from a criticism that John McDowell has made of the account of perception ... 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’...
CONTINENTAL IDEALISM Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with K... 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 ...
reinterpretation of the form of expression of earlier times, that Hegel himself instantiated. If ... more reinterpretation of the form of expression of earlier times, that Hegel himself instantiated. If Hegel was to be read as a post-Kantian, then Kant had to be read in a different way to that in which most interpreters I was aware of had read him, and from this perspective I found Henry Allison's Kant's Transcendental Idealism very helpful. As you know, I later came to be influenced by Findlay, but strangely not so much via his direct writings on Hegel. So, for my fifth book, as with the first, I will nominate a book that on the surface has nothing to do with Hegel but, under the surface, has everything to do with him. That is Findlay's Meinong's Theory of Objects (Clarendon Press, 1932, later expanded and republished as Meinong's Theory of Objects and Values, Clarendon Press, 1963). This was Findlay's PhD thesis, and I think of it as a book that could be subtitled, "How I found my way back to Hegel as a modal actualist"! Findlay had been an idealist before he became attracted to Meinong's philosophy, and one can read this book as his finding a way of construing logical structure in such a way so as to conceive of the actual world as immanent with unrealized possibilities in the way I alluded to earlier. The logic in question he got from his supervisor Ernst Mally, a former student of Meinong and early modal logician. Once more, I think that affinities might exist here with Hegel's logic that Findlay had been able to grasp.
Click title above for a short video on the contents of the book Conceptual Harmonies: The Origins... more Click title above for a short video on the contents of the book Conceptual Harmonies: The Origins and Relevance of Hegel's Logic
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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.
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.
Journal Articles by Paul M Redding
recognized in Hegel’s Science of Logic, structural features of his own mathematically
informed philosophy.
In this paper I look to Hegel’s discussion of magnitude in The Science of Logic, and especially to his conception of the relation between continuous and discrete magnitudes, in order to articulate a solution he might offer to difficulties encountered by Peirce in his opposition to Cantor’s set-theoretical analysis of the continuum. It is argued that Hegel’s interest in the ancient Platonic/Pythagorean tradition in mathematics provided him with crucial resources in this regard.
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
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
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.
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.
recognized in Hegel’s Science of Logic, structural features of his own mathematically
informed philosophy.
In this paper I look to Hegel’s discussion of magnitude in The Science of Logic, and especially to his conception of the relation between continuous and discrete magnitudes, in order to articulate a solution he might offer to difficulties encountered by Peirce in his opposition to Cantor’s set-theoretical analysis of the continuum. It is argued that Hegel’s interest in the ancient Platonic/Pythagorean tradition in mathematics provided him with crucial resources in this regard.
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
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
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
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”.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.