•  66
  •  65
    The analytic neo-hegelianism of John McDowell & Robert Brandom
    In Stephen Houlgate & Michael Baur (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Hegel, Blackwell. 2011.
    The historical origins of the analytic style that was to become dominant within academic philosophy in the English-speaking world are often traced to the work of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at the turn of the twentieth century, and portrayed as involving a radical break with the idealist philosophy that had bloomed in Britain at the end of the nineteenth. Congruent with this view, Hegel is typically taken as representing a type of philosophy that analytic philosophy assiduously avoids. Thus…Read more
  •  63
    In Mind and World and subsequent writings up to an essay first published in 2008 entitled “Avoiding the Myth of the Given”,1 John McDowell had insisted not only on the conceptuality of what is often discussed as “perceptual content” but also on the propositionality of that content. Many might find this puzzling. At the most intuitive level, one might think of the “content” of perception, what one perceives, as things— things with particular properties, and things arranged in particular relations…Read more
  •  56
    Recently a view of Hegel’s “idealism” which hitherto had seemed unquestionable—the view that it is fundamentally a metaphysical doctrine—has been seriously challenged. Thus yesterday’s metaphysical Hegel, complete with his cosmic megasubject hidden behind the events of nature and history, has been joined by today’s “nonmetaphysical Hegel,” the postkantian categorial “genealogist.” According to the nonmetaphysical Hegelians, a century and a half of misunderstanding has been based on the confusion…Read more
  •  56
  •  54
    Findlay’s Hegel: Idealism as Modal Actualism
    Critical Horizons 18 (4): 359-377. 2017.
    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 …Read more
  •  51
    The relation of logic to ontology in Hegel
    In Lila Haaparanta & Heikki Koskinen (eds.), Categories of Being: Essays on Metaphysics and Logic, Oxford University Press. 2012.
    Even among those philosophers who hold particular aspects of Hegel's philosophy in high regard, there have been few since the 19th century who have found Hegel's "metaphysics" plausible, and just as few not sceptical about the coherency of the "logical" project on which it is meant to be based. Indeed, against the type of work characteristic of the late nineteenth-century logical revolution which issued in modern analytic philosophy, it is often difficult to see exactly how Hegel's "logical" wri…Read more
  •  47
    If Hegel has been taken seriously at all in this century it has been qua social and political philosopher. As author of the Science of Logic, that work on which he considered the Realphilosophie dependent, he has been largely dismissed. Recently, however, interest in Hegel’s peculiar logico-ontological project as developed in his Logic has been revived and the traditional negative reading of this work challenged. Here debate has tended to center on the question of his relation to Kant. In contra…Read more
  •  44
    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…Read more
  •  43
    The understanding of Hegel's metaphysics that is here argued for—that it is a metaphysics of the actual world—may sound trivial or empty. To counter this, in part one the actualist reading of Hegel's idealism is opposed to two other currently popular interpretations, those of the naturalist and the conceptual realist respectively. While actualism shares motivations with each of these positions, it is argued that it is better equipped to capture what both aim to bring out in Hegel's metaphysics, …Read more
  •  43
    Hegel's hermeneutics
    Cornell University Press. 1996.
    An advance on recent revisionist thinking about Hegelian philosophy, this book interprets Hegel's achievement as part of a revolutionary modernization of ...
  •  41
    (Author’s reply at “Author-Meets-Critics” session (on Paul Redding, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought) at the Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, Vancouver, April 10, 2009. Robert Brandom’s “critic’s” contribution is available as “Hegel and Analytic Philosophy” from his website http://www.pitt.edu/~brandom/.).
  •  40
    Habermas's theory of argumentation
    Journal of Value Inquiry 23 (1): 15-32. 1989.
  •  38
    Eliminating emotions?
    with Russell Brown, Dominic Murphy, Stephen Stich, Donald Dryden, and Neil McNaughton
    Metascience 8 (1): 5-49. 1999.
  •  36
    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 en…Read more
  •  32
    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, i…Read more
  •  32
    Action, language and text: Dilthey's conception of the understanding
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 9 (2): 228-244. 1982.
  •  30
    Hegel: A Biography
    Mind 111 (442): 470-473. 2002.
  •  29
    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 A…Read more
  •  28
    Mind of God, Point of View of Man or Something Not Quite Either?
    In Paolo Diego Bubbio, Maurizio Pagano, Hager Weslati & Alessandro De Cesaris (eds.), in Paolo Diego Bubbio, Maurizio Pagano, Hager Weslati and Alessandro De Cesaris (eds), Hegel, Logic and Speculation, London: Bloomsbury, ISBN-13: 978-1350056367. DOI: 10.5040/9781350056381.ch-011., Bloomsbury. pp. 147-170. 2019.
    In his account of Plato’s ideas in the first book of the “Transcendental Dialectic”, “On the concepts of pure reason”, Kant, in describing how for Plato ideas were “archetypes of things themselves”, adds that these ideas “flowed from the highest reason, through which human reason partakes in them”.1 Later, in the section of the Transcendental Dialectic treating the “ideals of pure reason”, he again attributes to Plato the notion of a “divine mind” within which the “ideas” exist. An “ideal”, Kant…Read more
  •  27
    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,…Read more
  •  26
    My first experience of philosophy at the University of Sydney was as a commencing undergraduate in the tumultuous year of 1973. At the start of that year, there was one department of philosophy, but by the beginning of the next there were two. These two departments seemed to be opposed in every possible way except one: they both professed to be committed to a form of materialist philosophy. One could think that having a common enemy at least might have been the cause for some degree of unanimity…Read more
  •  26
    Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Merleau-Ponty (review)
    Philosophy and Literature 14 (1): 190-191. 1990.