“Hegel’s” Epistemology? Reflections on Some Recent Expositions (original) (raw)
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Philosophical Studies Series is primarily devoted to books within the tradition of contemporary analytic philosophy. Books in the series, whether written by a single author or as a collective work, are intended to manifest the highest levels of clarity and precision. They are intended to have the purpose of communicating important results to members of the profession and to be written in such a way as to be intelligible to philosophers whose specialty differs from the subject of the book. Some books are written on a specific problem, others on the work of one philosopher, and still other volumes are unified by method and style rather than subject matter. What is characteristic of the series is the editorial insistence on the combination of rigorous exposition with general comprehension. It is the intention of the editors that the books in the series shall present the issues that are of the greatest current interest.
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Reputation not withstanding, Hegel was a sophisticated epistemologist, whose views have great contemporary importance. I summarize main features of his epistemology (§2), elaborate some thematic connections between Hegel's views and contemporary problems (§3), and consider Hegel's epistemology in relation to 20 th-century empiricism (§4), Dretske's information theory (§5), and the debate between realists and historicist relativists (§6). § §2-4 are summary; § §5, 6 consider closely some important social aspects of Hegel's epistemology. Two themes are that Hegel anticipated the recent rejections in epistemology of concept-empiricism and of individualism; by rejecting mental content "internalism," Hegel showed how rejecting those positions does not forego realism about the objects of empirical knowledge.
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There is no better way to characterize G.W.F Hegel (1770-1831) than as a philosopher of truth. Like most classical and early modern thinkers, Hegel believed that the task of philosophy was to furnish as comprehensive and true an account of reality as possible. As in Aristotle or Spinoza, truth as a category implied extreme rigor, a uniquely wide breadth of scope-ranging from physics and ontology to politics and logic-and a capacity both to reflect the world as it actually is and to express it in the form of a system. Systematicity was for Hegel proof of thoroughness and of the muscularity of reason, but it also mirrored formally an important aspect of reality itself: the latter, he argued, was also a kind of system-an organized, deeply interconnected, and (to some extent) living (or at least dynamic) whole. From a Hegelian standpoint, truth exists not just in the sense that it is possible, that it can be grasped, shared, and made actionable by humans (or perhaps other rational creatures), but that it is fundamentally thisworldly or immanent, rather than other-worldly or transcendent. Truth was not, as in Platonic Idealism, something that hovered over or preceded the world in the form of a static essence. Nor was it contained, ready-made, in the mind of God, an eternal logic or law that only had to be humbly recited by humans to be known. These ways of understanding truth, thought Hegel, reduced humans to passive instruments of a reality they had no hand in making themselves. Instead, truth was best understood as back-bendingly difficult work-a process that could be understood as simultaneously discovery (of something objectively there in the world) and invention (something we ourselves create and wilfully sustain). Despite Hegel's reputation in some circles as an austere theologian of eternity it is important to keep in mind the deeply existential dimension of Hegel's work, one that helps to explain why he was taken up so readily
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