Abstract

In this book, Paul Redding argues both that Hegel’s thought is making a resurgence in some quarters of analytic philosophy, and that such a resurgence is well-deserved and will bear future fruit. He begins with Bertrand Russell’s story of analytic philosophy as born out of a rejection of Hegelian thought, and traces the development of an alternative path through analytic philosophy that moves through Frege, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Evans, and finds its fullest contemporary form in Brandom and McDowell. This alternative path, he claims, has important historical roots in Hegel, although not in Russell’s caricatured version of him.Redding reads Hegel as the direct inheritor of Kant and Aristotle, especially with respect to logic, the role of the singular in thought, and the nature of evaluative judgment, and he argues that Hegel gives us the materials with which to overcome Sellars’ myth of the given productively. He also gives extended readings of Hegel’s principle of determinate negation and rejection of the principle of non-contradiction, as well as of the ontology of Hegelian Spirit as the unity of substance and subject, all designed to reveal these components of Hegelian thought as productive resources for analytic philosophers