Paul Redding

ABSTRACTHegel's Phenomenology of Spirit provides a fascinating picture of individual minds caught up in “recognitive” relations so as to constitute a realm—“spirit”—which, while necessarily embedded in nature, is not reducible to it. In this essay I suggest a contemporary path for developing Hegel's suggestive ideas in a way that broadly conforms to the demands of his own system, such that one moves from logic to a philosophy of mind. Hence 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 the modal logician Arthur 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.

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.

In the 1930s, C. I. Lewis, who was responsible for the revival of modal logic in the era of modern symbolic logic, characterized ‘intensional’ approaches to logic as typical of post-Leibnizian ‘continental philosophy’, in contrast to the ‘extensionalist’ approaches dominant in the British tradition. Indeed Lewis’s own work in this area had been inspired by the logic of his teacher, the American ‘Absolute Idealist’, Josiah Royce. Hegel’s ‘Subjective Logic’ in Book III of hisScience of Logic, can, I suggest, be considered as an intensional modal logic, and this paper explores parallels between it and a later variety of modal logic—tenselogic, as developed by Arthur Prior in the 1950s and 60s. Like Lewis, Prior too had been influenced in this area by a teacher with strong Hegelian leanings—John N. Findlay. Treated as anintensional logic, Hegel’s subjective logic can be used as a framework for addressing issues ofintentionality—the mind’s capacity to be intentionally directed to objects. In this way, I suggest that the structures of his subjective logic can clarify what is at issue in the ‘Psychology’ section of theEncyclopaediaPhilosophy of Subjective Spirit.

Terry Pinkard has been a leading figure within the revival of Hegelian philosophy over the last quarter century, together with Robert Pippin articulating an innovative and influential interpretation of Hegel as the rightful successor to Kant’s distinctly modern critique of “dogmatic metaphysics.” In Does History Make Sense?, he attempts the challenging task of rescuing Hegel’s philosophy of history, drawing on his earlier account of Hegel as a kind of “modified Aristotelian naturalist,” here sketched in chapter 1. Given that the picture of Hegel as an Aristotelian “conceptual realist” has been popular with critics of the post-Kantian...

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 /

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 that philosophy bears to religion, rather than to the empirical sciences, within the Hegelian system. To the decidedly more secular philosophical outlook of the twentieth century, Hegel's systematic philosophy has looked more like Christian apologetics dressed up in an unorthodox metaphysical garb, and interest in Hegel, where present, has mainly cast him in the role of historical precursor to generally more secular-looking philosophies, an orientation that had commenced soon after his death with the "left" Hegelian movement. Over the last two decades of the twentieth century, however, this dominant twentieth-century view has been increasingly challenged.

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.

As Jean-Philippe suggests in his sketch of my account of Hegel’s concept of recognition, Hegel doesn’t think of self-reflection as basically achieved by “stepping back” and viewing one’s ideas from a type of metaperspective. Rather, self-consciousness comes primarily via engagement with another, differently located subject. (If I had a badge slogan for this, it might read “Other, not Meta”.) While at a theoretical level I’ve held to a dialogical model of philosophizing for a considerable time, it is in contexts such as these that one gets a deeper sense of just how dependent on dialogical engagement any thinking actually is. There is too much in what my four interlocutors have said to respond adequately here to all points, but I’ll try to pick up on what strike me as important issues. I’ll reply to each in turn, but each reply will address issues that overflow the boundaries between separating 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].

McDowell’s attempts to find a way out of the grip of some seemingly intractable problems besetting analytic philosophy has led him back to Kant and Hegel. Understanding, with Kant, the role played by concepts in experience will point the way forward, but Kant’s thinking must be released from its own problems which threaten to reduce the contents of experience and knowledge to “facts about us”. Kant’s “subjectivism” must be subjected to an “Hegelian” critique. However, McDowell’s solution to that problem, which involves a radical reinterpretation of Kant’s concept–intuition distinction, introduces new problems. Here I contrast McDowell’s reinterpretation of the intuition–concept relation with a less radical one suggested by Wilfrid Sellars, and based on his diagnosis of the ambiguity of Kant’s notion of intuition. The Sellarsian modest revision of Kant both gives a better account of perceptual experience and helps us better to understand the step that Hegel had taken beyond Kant.

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..

In his recent book James Kreines argues that for Hegel reason is “in the world”, but how we are to understand the idea of reason's being so located? One answer, suggested by more traditional theocentric readings of Hegel, would be to appeal to the idea of a divine thought, coursing through the world. Another answer, more congenial to modern sensibilities, might locate reason within the rational activities of inter-subjectively connected human beings, as suggested by Terry Pinkard's idea of the “sociality of reason”. Kreines seems to want to avoid suggestions of the former, but in distancing himself from approaches like the latter, he also seems to refuse the more metaphysically modest alternative. In retracing the contours of Kreines's nuanced attempt to reinflate Hegel's metaphysics as a “metaphysics of reason”, I pose the question as to whether he can avoid reintroducing a more extravagantly metaphysical Hegel than he wishes.