Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (review)

In this book, Paul Redding argues both that Hegel’s thought is making a resurgence in some quarters of analytic philosophy, and that such a resurgence is well-deserved and will bear future fruit. He begins with Bertrand Russell’s story of analytic philosophy as born out of a rejection of Hegelian thought, and traces the development of an alternative path through analytic philosophy that moves through Frege, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Evans, and finds its fullest contemporary form in Brandom and McDowell. This alternative path, he claims, has important historical roots in Hegel, although not in Russell’s caricatured version of him.

Redding reads Hegel as the direct inheritor of Kant and Aristotle, especially with respect to logic, the role of the singular in thought, and the nature of evaluative judgment, and he argues that Hegel gives us the materials with which to overcome Sellars’ myth of the given productively. He also gives extended readings of Hegel’s principle of determinate negation and rejection of the principle of non-contradiction, as well as of the ontology of Hegelian Spirit as the unity of substance and subject, all designed to reveal these components of Hegelian thought as productive resources for analytic philosophers.

The first couple of chapters explore two versions of the myth of the given. Redding helpfully distinguishes between the perceptual given (singular intuitions that can rationally constrain thought and belief) and the logical given (“the quasi-Platonic idea that we are capable of direct and unmediated intuition of laws or principles that are then applied in behavior”) (73). He presents McDowell as an effective enemy of the perceptual given, Brandom as the vanquisher of the logical given, and both as drawing upon Sellarsian and Hegelian conceptual tools. The third chapter offers a reading of Hegelian determinate negation. The fourth chapter reads Kant as a precursor of contemporary pragmatic inferentialism, most paradigmatically represented by Brandom. Chapters five and six turn to evaluative judgment. Redding reads McDowell’s rejection of the idea that perception presents us with a “motivationally inert” world as based on a conception of human nature with both Aristotelian and Hegelian roots. He also finds important support for such a picture in Kant’s third Critique, an underappreciated text in the context of debates about the given and the nature of normative judgment. The last two chapters are the only ones to delve into Hegel’s own texts in any detail; they offer careful readings of Hegel’s rejection of the principle of non-contradiction and his insistence upon the unity of substance and subject. Redding draws a compelling connection at the end of the book between Sellars’ conception of rationality as self-correcting nature and Hegel’s conception of self-actualizing Spirit.

There is a peculiarity built into the structure of this book: Redding begins with an in-depth exploration of Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell, all of whom self-identify as thinkers with deeply Kantian and Hegelian roots; only later does he explore Kant’s and Hegel’s texts directly. As a result, we mostly learn what Redding means by calling an idea ‘Kantian’ or ‘Hegelian’ through Sellars’, McDowell’s, and Brandom’s own invocations of them. But it is hardly surprising that these thinkers turn out to be post-Kantian and post-Hegelian on his reading. To take the most obvious example, it is no real revelation that Brandom turns out to be a Hegelian thinker, once we begin with Brandom’s own description of what is Hegelian about his thought as our way into understanding Hegel. Given that the point of the book is to identify Hegelian themes in analytic philosophy, one might have expected the order of exposition to be reversed.

Cutting close to the heart of Redding’s project is his willingness to follow Brandom in focusing his reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit on the first few chapters of the book—namely, the movement that Hegel calls ‘Consciousness’, and in...