Abstract
Hegel’s philosophical achievement is not only hard to state economically. Hegel is among the few modern philosophers about whom there is a dispute as to whether he achieved anything at all. Hegel has been, to be sure, one of the most influential of all modern philosophers. However, it is by now a well-known and even rather tired claim that the heroic founders of contemporary analytic philosophy — Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore — not only explicitly rejected Hegelianism but accused it of more or less complete charlatanry, and that this view stuck among their intellectual descendants. (The only other major figure who occupies such a contested place in the canon is probably Martin Heidegger.)
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Notes
The obvious allusion here is to Hilary Putnam’s famous “twin earth” example. See Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” in Mind, Language and Reality, vol. 2 of Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215–71.
See Robert B. Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), where this argument is more explicitly laid out.
See Robert B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002);
Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and
Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s “Phenomenology”: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
See Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness; Sebastian Rödl, Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Pinkard, Hegel’s “Phenomenology”; and
Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
A. W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Robert Pippin has put this distinction to work in several recent pieces on the Logic, which also inform my discussion here. See
Robert B. Pippin, “Logik und Metaphysik: Hegels Reich der Schatten” (Robert Curtius lecture, University of Bonn, June 2013); and Robert B. Pippin, “Negation in Hegels Logik,” in 200 Jahre “Wissenschaft der Logik,” ed. Claudia Wirsing (Hamburg: Meiner, forthcoming).
One would hope that the idea of Hegelian method as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, first introduced by H. M. Chalybäus in 1848 as the “key” to Hegel’s system, would have died out by now, but it seems to have assumed a life of its own. See Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, Historische entwickelung der speculativen philosophie von Kant bis Hegel (Dresden: Arnoldi, 1848).
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© 2014 Terry Pinkard
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Pinkard, T. (2014). Hegel’s Philosophical Achievement. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_28
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