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  • The “Myth of the Given”: The Hegelian Meditations of Wilfrid Sellars
  • Yury Selivanov

There is a quite outstanding and surprising fact about today’s philosophical life in America, namely, the return of Hegelian philosophy to the debates among American philosophers, and even analytic philosophers are taking an active part in that process. Nothing of the kind could be observed at least since the time of the St. Louis and Ohio Hegelians of the nineteenth century. From the beginning of the triumphal march of analytic philosophy through the Anglo-American philosophical world, the philosophy of Hegel seemed to appear to any impartial observer obsolete and abandoned for good.

However, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, American authors proclaimed in concert “the revival of Hegelian philosophy” and even “Hegel’s Renaissance.”1 The editor of a collection of essays dedicated to the legacy of German idealism, E. Hammer, writes in the preface:

Few trends in contemporary philosophy seem stronger and more influential than the resurgence and revival of themes and arguments that owe their origin to thinkers associated with German idealism. Not only has scholarship (particularly in the Anglo-American context) on figures such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel become more [End Page 677] sophisticated, prestigious and creative than it has been for a long time, but the innovative uses to which idealist motifs have recently been put have changed the nature of many philosophical debates. Drawing on strong readings and reconceptualizing traditional arguments, philosophers working in fields as different as epistemology, philosophy of language, political theory, ethics and aesthetics have opened new intellectual vistas while reinvigorating others. For central thinkers of our time such as Robert Brandom, Stanley Cavell, Jürgen Habermas, John McDowell, Hilary Putnam, and many others, Kant and Hegel are household names whose writings have served as a basis for the development of their own work.2

Such remarks, although they might look somewhat exaggerated, nevertheless reflect the real process occurring in contemporary philosophical thought, which requires consideration.

Richard Bernstein, one of the most significant representatives of contemporary American pragmatism, outlines three main factors that, according to him, led gradually to the change in the attitude of American thinkers toward Hegelian philosophy.3 First is a political one—philosophers who were politically active and interested in a “humanistic” Marx in the 1950s and 1960s turned to Hegel as the primary source of Marxist social philosophy. Frederick Beiser also draws our attention to this political factor in his analysis of Hegel scholarship in the United States.4

The second circumstance favorable to a Hegel revival is that there was a group of American philosophers who were not satisfied with the limits of analytic philosophy and, while in search of wider horizons, discovered Hegel as a rich source of philosophical material. This group, according to Bernstein, included Charles Taylor, Alisdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, and himself.

Alongside Bernstein’s analysis we can put the considerations of Richard Rorty, who describes in his writings the “pragmatization” of contemporary analytic philosophy in America, which, among other things, has broadened the cultural and historical horizons of analytic philosophy and involves the Continental tradition, a process hailed and propelled by Rorty himself. The pragmatization of analytic philosophy as represented by Rorty has strongly influenced the rehabilitation of Hegelian thought in America. In Rorty’s words, the results of this antireductionist and anti-empiricist polemic “were such that something which seemed much like idealism began to become intellectually respectable.”5 Anjie Gimmler makes an even more [End Page 678] accentuated remark and explains the revival in such a way that the ties between Hegel and contemporary American thought begin to look quite solid and historically justified: “Various representatives of neopragmatism refer to Hegel because in Hegel’s idealism the central themes of neopragmatism can already be identified as preconfigured, or at least can be traced to their origins.”6 These preliminary remarks make us consider with seriousness the third factor according to Bernstein.

The third factor Bernstein mentions is the work of Wilfrid Sellars. Wilfrid Sellars is really the right figure to start the talk about contemporary American Hegelianism. Sellars belongs to that group of thinkers, alongside Quine, Davidson, Rorty, Kuhn, and Feyerabend...

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