Paul Redding

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”.

Can Hegel, a philosopher who claims that philosophy lsquo;has no other object but God and so is essentially rational theologyrsquo;, ever be taken as anything emother than/em a religious philosopher with little to say to any philosophical project that identifies itself as emsecular/em?nbsp; If the valuable substantive insights found in the detail of Hegelrsquo;s philosophy are to be rescued for a secular philosophy, then, it is commonly presupposed, some type of global reinterpretation of the enframing idealistic framework is required. In this essay, this assumption is challenged. br /br /Kantrsquo;s interpretation of space and time as a response to Newtonrsquo;s theologically based spatio-temporal emrealism/em is taken as a model of what it is to be a Kantian emidealist/em about God and the self. In turn, Hegelrsquo;s philosophy is taken as a development of this approach that overcomes the limitations of Kantrsquo;s formal approach. Hegelrsquo;s major contribution to Kantrsquo;s revolutionary transformation of the task of philosophy is, it is argued, his recognitive conception of lsquo;spiritrsquo;. While this has been widely appreciated with regard to the relations between lsquo;subjectiversquo; and lsquo;objectiversquo; spirit, it is suggested that a fuller understanding of the nature of Hegelrsquo;s emabsolute/em idealism requires a proper understanding of how this approach also applies to the domain of lsquo;absolute spiritrsquo;. br /br /

This 2007 book examines the possibilities for the rehabilitation of Hegelian thought within 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. 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.

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‘.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Wilhelm Dilthey, in his reflections on the nature of history as a “Geisteswissenschaft”—a science of “spirit” as opposed to “nature”—appealed “to Hegel’s notion of “spirit” (Geist). Attempting to extract Hegel’s concept from what he considered the unsupportable metaphysical system within which it had been developed, Dilthey, a neo-Kantian, gave it a broadly epistemological significance by correlating it with a distinct type of “understanding” (Verstehen) that was foreign to the Naturwissenschaften, concerned as they were with explanation (Erklären) of phenomena in terms of laws of nature. Moreover, the paradigm of such an anti-naturalistic approach to history was not Hegel’s philosophical approach to history, but the strongly empiricist practice of the romantic “historical school”, found paradigmatically in the work of Leopold von Ranke.

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 incorporated Platonic and Aristotelian elements in 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. Far from ending here, however, Redding argues that post-Kantian idealists such as 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.

In Making It Explicit, Robert Brandom has suggested an "inferentialist" alternative to the dominant "representationalist" paradigm within modern philosophy, an alternative based upon a form of pragmatism that he describes as both rationalist and linguistic.1 Representationalists typically think of awareness in terms of mental contents which somehow represent or picture worldly things, events, or states of affairs. Linguistic, rationalist pragmatists, in contrast, shift the focus from conscious experience to human linguistic practices, and specifically to the norms of rationality implicit within these practices — a shift from sentience to sapience — and approach the meanings of our linguistic claims entirely in terms of the normative inferential relations between them.

Hegel’s treatment of ‘Moralität’ in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right provides important clues as to how he conceives the recognitive dynamics of modern moral life. As ‘spirit that is certain of itself’, morality as comprehended in the Phenomenology is the final form of spirit [Geist], which, in Hegel’s exposition, follows ‘reason’ which itself had followed ‘consciousness’ and ‘self-consciousness’. Spirit had first been considered in its objective form as an ‘in itself’. This was the ‘true spirit’ of the ethical world of antiquity. As something ‘for itself’, spirit had then been considered in its self-alienated form as ‘culture’ which had culminated in an analysis of modern politics—specifically the political project of ‘absolute freedom’, the French Revolution, and the terroristic consequences that had been so acutely linked to the modern rationalist political project by Schiller. But, as many have pointed out, if Rousseau was the theorist of the modern political struggle for autonomy, Kant had an equally revolutionary conception of moral autonomy, which, like Rousseau, put the idea of a self-legislating will at the centre of thought. Such an internalization of the self-legislating will, however, now reveals the proper object for judgment in terms of the evaluative polarity of good and bad—the will itself. This evaluation becomes the task of conscience. In this paper I examine Hegel’s treatment of the role of conscience in moral judgment in the light of his relationship to Fichte, and interpret it in terms of a broadly conceived pragmatics of reason-giving in moral life implicit in his concept of intersubjective recognition [Anerkennung].

It is sometimes said that changes in academic philosophy in the twentieth century reflected a process in which a discipline that had been earlier closely tied to institutional religion became increasingly laicized and secularized.1 In line with this idea, the idealist philosophy that had flowered within British philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century can look like the last and ill-fated attempt of a Victorian religious sensibility to guard itself against a post-Darwinian God-less view of the world and ourselves.2 Such a view generally represents, I believe, the attitudes of many contemporary philosophers to British philosophy prior to the transforming work of Russell and Moore of about one hundred years ago. Against the luxuriant and mystical metaphysics of the idealists, fuelled by religious longing, the “new philosophy”, it is thought, affirmed the brute materiality of the world and its independence from mind, be it divine or human. A similar development is commonly understood as carrying from Hegel through the “young Hegelians” to the mature Marx. Thus for Feuerbach, for example, Hegel’s idealist doctrine that “nature or reality is posited by the idea” was “merely the rational expression of the theological doctrine that nature is created by God”.3 Hegel’s philosophy had thus provided a “last place of refuge and ... rational support of theology”, and escaping from this condition (more prison than refuge) required rejecting idealism and confronting the fact that “the true relation of thinking and being is simply this. Being is subject and thinking a predicate but a predicate such as...