Hegel’s Critique of Psychologism

Abstract

At the end of his masterful study Frege: The Philosophy of Language, Michael Dummett, the doyen of Frege scholarship, argues with a certain modicum of self-assurance that idealism, especially Hegel’s, “is by its very nature prone to slip into psychologism, although the possibility of a viable idealistic theory of meaning depends precisely upon the possibility of resisting this temptation.”¹ Dummett claims furthermore that in “Frege’s day the kind of idealism that was everywhere prevalent in the philosophical schools was infected with psychologism through and through. [So] it was not until it had been decisively overthrown that it became possible to envisage a non-psychologistic version of idealism.”² For Dummett, Frege presides over the requiem of idealism through his critique of psychologism, a critique which, by implication, would toss Hegel’s idealism into the historical litter basket that, in Dummett’s view, so obviously yawns for it.³