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3210Hegel, Aristotle and the Conception of Free AgencyIn Gunnar Hindrichs Axel Honneth (ed.), Freiheit: Stuttgarter Hegelkrongress 2011, Vittorio Klostermann. 2013.
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1258Pragmatism, Idealism, and the Modal Menace: Rorty, Brandom, and Truths about PhotonsThe European Legacy 19 (2): 174-186. 2014.In a short exchange published in 2000, Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom differed over the status of “facts” in a world containing no speakers and, hence, no speech acts. While Brandom wanted to retain the meaningfulness of talk of “facts” or “truths” about things—in this case truths about photons —in a world in which there could be no claimings about such things, Rorty denied the existence of any such “worldly items” as “facts.” In this essay the difference between Rorty and Brandom on this issu…Read more
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1038Hegel, Idealism and God: Philosophy as the Self-Correcting Appropriation of the Norms of Life and ThoughtCosmos and History : The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 3 (2-3): 16-31. 2007.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
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859The Necessity of History for Philosophy – Even Analytic PhilosophyJournal of the Philosophy of History 7 (3): 299-325. 2013.Analytic philosophers are often said to be indifferent or even hostile to the history of philosophy – that is, not to the idea of history of philosophy as such, but regarded as a species of the genus philosophy rather than the genus history. Here it is argued that such an attitude is actually inconsistent with approaches within the philosophies of mind that are typical within analytic philosophy. It is suggested that the common “argument rather than pedigree” claim – that is, that claim that phi…Read more
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789Thom Brook's project of a systematic reading of Hegel's Philosophy of RightHegel Bulletin 33 (2). 2012.Thom Brooks'sHegel's Political Philosophy: A Systematic Reading of the Philosophy of Rightpresents a very clear and methodologically self-conscious series of discussions of key topics within Hegel's classic text. As one might expect for a ‘systematic’ reading, the main body of Brooks's text commences with an opening chapter on Hegel's system. Then follow seven chapters, the topics of which are encountered sequentially as one reads through thePhilosophy of Right. Brooks's central claim is that to…Read more
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593An Hegelian Solution to a Tangle of Problems Facing Brandom'S Analytic PragmatismBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (4): 657-680. 2015.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 faci…Read more
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497Wilfrid Sellars's Disambiguation of Kant's "Intuition" and its Relevance for the Analysis of Perceptual ContentParadigmi. Rivista di Critica Filosofica 30 (1). 2012.
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467Rethinking Sellars’ Myth of the Given: From the Epistemological to the Modal Relevance of Givenness in Kant and HegelInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 27 (3): 379-398. 2019.ABSTRACTHere, I pursue consequences, for the interpretation of Sellars’ critique of the ‘Myth of the Given’, of separating the modal significance that Kant attributed to empirical intuition from th...
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450Some Metaphysical Implications of Hegel’s TheodicyEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (1): 129--150. 2012.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 Chr…Read more
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386Prior to Kojève's well-known account in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel there seems to have been relatively little interest in Hegel's concept of recognition— Anerkennung.1 After Kojève, however, a popular view of Hegel's philosophy emerged within which the idea of recognition plays a central role: what distinguishes us as selfconscious beings from the rest of nature is that we are driven by a peculiar type of desire, the desire for recognition leading to struggle's over recognition. Wh…Read more
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382Hegel, modal logic, and the social nature of mindInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (5): 586-606. 2019.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…Read more
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350Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (review)Philosophical Review 119 (3): 137-140. 2010.
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305Embodiment, conceptuality and intersubjectivity in idealist and pragmatist approaches to judgmentJournal of Speculative Philosophy 15 (4): 257-271. 2001.
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146Habermas, Lyotard, Wittgenstein: Philosophy at the Limits of ModernityThesis Eleven 14 (1): 9-25. 1986.
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127The Role of Logic "Commonly So Called" in Hegel's Science of LogicBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (2): 281-301. 2014.This paper examines Hegel’s accounts of the nature of judgements and inferences in the ‘subjective logic’ of the Science of Logic, and does so in light of the history of the tradition of formal logic to his time. It is argued that, contrary to the attitude often displayed by interpreters of Hegel’s logic, it is important to understand the positive role played by formal logic, ‘logic commonly so called’, in Hegel’s own conception of logic. It is argued that Hegel’s own scientific presentation [Da…Read more
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123Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian ThoughtCambridge University Press. 2007.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 are…Read more
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111McDowell's Radicalization of Kant's Account of Concepts and Intuitions: a Sellarsian (and Hegelian) CritiqueVerifiche: Rivista Trimestrale di Scienze Umane 41 (1–3). 2012.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…Read more
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105Hermeneutic or Metaphysical Hegelianism? Kojève’s DilemmaThe Owl of Minerva 22 (2): 175-189. 1991.Between 1933 and 1939 Alexandre Kojève gave his series of celebrated lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Importantly, Kojève claimed to be reading Hegel in the wake of a philosopher whom he considered to be, along with Marx, the only important philosopher since Hegel - Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time had appeared in 1927. Indeed, Kojève went so far as to claim that Hegel’s Phenomenology “would probably never have been understood if…Read more
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97Hegel’s Anticipation of the Early History of Analytic PhilosophyThe Owl of Minerva 42 (1/2). 2010.Putting it very crudely, it might be said that in the much discussed opening three chapters that make up the section “Consciousness” of his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel sketches and “test-drives” various models for a consciousness able to experience and know the world.1 Kant had thought of objects of experience as necessarily having conceptual (as well as spatio-temporal) form, but non-conceptual (“intuitional”) content. But for Hegel, that objects show themselves to have a conceptual form emer…Read more
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91Pierre Bourdieu: From neo-Kantian to Hegelian critical social theoryCritical Horizons 6 (1): 183-204. 2005.This paper challenges the commonly made claim that the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development of Bourdieu's work from its earliest structuralist through its later 'post-structuralist' phase is better described in terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neo-Kantian to a distinctly Hegelian post-Kantian outlook. In his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to a bodily based 'logic of practice' to explain the …Read more
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88Two directions for analytic kantianism : Naturalism and idealismIn Mario de Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism and Normativity, Columbia University Press. 2010.Usually, analytic philosophy is thought of as standing firmly within the tradition of empiricism, but recently attention has been drawn to the strongly Kantian features that have characterized this philosophical movement throughout a considerable part of its history. Those charting the history of early analytic philosophy sometimes point to a more Kantian stream of thought feeding it from both Frege and Wittgenstein, and as countering a quite different stream flowing from the early Russell and M…Read more
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84The possibility of German idealism after analytic philosophy : McDowell, Brandom and beyondIn James Williams (ed.), Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, Continuum. 2010.The late Richard Rorty was no stranger to provocation, and many an analytic philosopher would surely count as extremely provocative comments he had made on Robert Brandom’s highly regarded book from 1994, Making It Explicit.1 Brandom’s book was, Rorty asserted “an attempt to usher analytic philosophy from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage.”2 The reception of Kant within analytic philosophy has surely been, at best, patchy, but if it is difficult to imagine exactly what Rorty could have had in mi…Read more
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83Leibniz and Newton on Space, Time and the TrinityJournal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry 7 (16): 26-41. 2011.Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was born in 1646 just before the end of the Thirty Years War and who died 1716, is surely one of the most bizarre and interesting of the early modern philosophers. He was an astonishing polymath, and responsible for some of the most advanced work in the sciences of his day—he was, for instance, the co-inventor along with Newton, of differential calculus, and is generally recognized as the greatest logician of the early modern period, responsible for advances in log…Read more
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81The Relevance of Hegel’s “Absolute Spirit” to Social NormativityIn Heikki Ikäheimo & Arto Laitinen (eds.), Recognition and Social Ontology, Brill. pp. 212--238. 2011.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)…Read more
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81Hegel, Fichte and the pragmatic contexts of moral judgmentIn Espen Hammer (ed.), German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives, Routledge. 2007.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…Read more
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77Tragedy, Recognition and the Death of God (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201307. 2013.
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