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
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Notes
Cf. Michael Dummett, “Gottlob Frege” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 4, ed., Paul Edwards (New York, MacMillan Publishers, 1967), p. 225.
I draw this claim from Kenley Dove’s article “Die Epochē der Phänomenologie des Geistes” in Hegel-Studien, Beiheft XI (Bonn: Bouvier, 1973), pp. 605–621.
Jakob Fries, System der Metaphysik, (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1967), p. 107.
For an excellent discussion of the importance for maintaining the distinction between the immediacy of knowledge and the immediacy of givenness in epistemology, see Gerold Prauss’ ,Einführung in die Erkenntnistheorie, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), especially pp. 56–65.
G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller, (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), p. 52.
G.W.F. Hegel, Logic: Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. W. Wallace, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), § 3, p. 6. Since the translation is mine, one can see Enzyklopädie derphilosophischen Wissenschaften (1830), ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), § 3, p. 44.
In what follows in the remainder of this section, I am indebted to Robert B. Pippin’s excellent book, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially pp. 232–260.
For a good discussion of Hegel’s criticisms of traditional predication theory, see Terry Pinkard’s Hegel’s Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 74–80.
For a discussion of Hegel’s theory of determinacy in terms of a theory of meaning, see Hans Friedrich Fulda’s “Unzulängliche Bemerkungen zur Dialektik” in Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophic Hegels, ed., R.-P. Horstmann, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), pp. 33–69.
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Kirkland, F.M. (1993). Hegel’s Critique of Psychologism. In: Kirkland, F.M., Chattopadhyaya, D.P. (eds) Phenomenology: East and West. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 13. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1612-1_15
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