Substantive Philosophy, Infallibilism and the Critique of Metaphysics: Hegel and the Historicity of Philosophical Reason

Abstract

One reason for chronic misunderstanding of Hegel’s challenging and revolutionary views is that important relations between philosophy and its history are often over-simplified, not least because the issues and views of historical philosophers are too often reduced to stereotypes if not caricatures. For example, if the views of seventeenth — and eighteenth-century philosophers were as meagre as Richard Rorty’s characterizations in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1 philosophy’s history would rightly be dismissed. It must be said, however, that Rorty’s book could only impress readers woefully ignorant of the history of philosophy. The views Rorty presented and criticized were — by now we should be able to use the past tense — the caricatures of historical views then typical in graduate seminars in (largely) analytical departments. I was fortunate to have studied in what was one of the few analytic departments which took (and still takes) historical philosophy seriously as philosophy.²