Videos by Paul M Redding
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. 68 views
Books by Paul M Redding
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.
University of Chicago Press, 2023
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.
Journal Articles by Paul M Redding
HOPOS, 2024
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.
Philosophies, 2024
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
Journal of Philosophical Investigations, 2024
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.
Logics, 2024
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.
History and Philosophy of Logic, 2023
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
Re vista Eletrônica Estudos Hegelianos, 2022
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.
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Videos by Paul M Redding
Books by Paul M Redding
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.