Some Hegelian Ideas of Note for 4 Contemporary Analytic Philosophy

10 I take my point of departure from Paul Redding’s thoughtful and thought11 provoking book Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought, which I see as 12 a paradigm of the sort of philosophy Hegel described as ‘its time, captured in 13 thought.’ It is at once impressively and usefully learned, and philosophically 14 insightful and suggestive. Redding’s strategy is to tunnel from two directions. On 15 the one hand, he has interesting things to say about what elements in the analytic 16 tradition make it ripe for a Hegelian turn. On the other, he lays out some features 17 of Hegel’s views that are particularly amenable to appropriation by that tradition. 18 I want to say a bit about each of these topics. 19 Redding is good on the origin myth that Bertrand Russell concocted, which 20 locates the wellsprings of the analytic movement in a principled recoil from 21 what the British Idealists made of Hegel. At the core of Russell’s story is the 22 opposition between Hegelian holism, viewed through a Bradleyan lens, and the 23 atomism he saw as demanded by the new quantificational logic. The overarching 24 choice he saw was between ontological monism and pluralism: as he memorably 25 put it, between seeing the universe as a bowl of jelly and seeing it as a bucket of 26 shot. On such an understanding, semantic, logical, and metaphysical atomism is 27 an, indeed the, essential, founding principle of analytic philosophy. 28 But the early analytic tradition did not speak with just this one, Russellian, 29 voice. Redding also reminds us that the first step on the holistic road to Hegel 30 was taken already by Kant, who broke with the traditional order of semantic and 31 logical explanation by insisting on the primacy of judgment. He understood 32 particular and general representations, intuitions and concepts, only in terms of 33 the functional role they played in judgment. (I think that is because judgments are 34 the minimal units of responsibility, so that the primacy of judgment should be 35 understood as an immediate consequence of the normative turn Kant had given