ABSTRACTAnalytic philosophy is often associated with a physicalistic naturalism that privileges natural-scientific modes of explanation. Nevertheless there has since the 1980s been a heterodox, somewhat subterranean trend within analytic philosophy that seeks to articulate a more expansive, ‘non-reductive‘ conception of nature. This trend can be traced back to P.F. Strawson’s 1985 book Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties. However, Strawson has long been ignored in the literature around ‘soft naturalism’ – especially in comparison to John McDowell. One of the reasons for (...) this is that Strawson’s account of soft naturalism is not often viewed as particularly plausible – it has come in for heavy criticism from the likes of Sebastian Gardner and Robert Stern. In this paper, I argue that Strawson’s soft naturalism ought to be re-assessed: that his critics can be refuted, and that his naturalism remains a compelling alternative to the likes of McDowell’s. I attempt this through a ‘radicalisation’ of the modest Strawson’s position, demonstrating that his naturalism has implicit in it something like Marx’s conception of human ‘species-being’. (shrink)

Hegel conceives of human beings as both natural and spirited. On Robert Pippin's influential reading, we are natural by being ‘ontologically’ like other animals, but spirited through a ‘social-historical achievement’. I contest both the coherence of this reading and its fidelity to Hegel's texts. For Hegel the human being is the truth of the animal. This means that spirit's self-production is not, as Pippin claims, an achievement that an animal confers on itself, but the realization of what the human being (...) is. I end by specifying Aristotelian features of Hegel's account whose neglect by Pippin can help explain what goes wrong in his reading, and provide the outlines of a reading that is both coherent and faithful to Hegel's texts. (shrink)

In the recent Hegel literature there has been an effort to portray Hegel's philosophy as compatible with naturalism, or even as a form of naturalism (see for example Pippin 2008 and Pinkard 2012). Despite the attractions of such a project, there is, it seems to me, another, and potentially more interesting way of looking at the relationship of Hegel to naturalism. Instead of showing how Hegel's philosophy can be compatible with naturalism, I propose to show how Hegel's philosophy offers a (...) challenge to naturalism. Naturalism has become the dominant ideology in much of contemporary analytic philosophy (Kim 2003: 84), but also within other disciplines. Evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics, which attract a lot of media attention, attempt to explain the human mind and human behavior in purely naturalistic terms, usually in terms of the biological past and makeup of humans (Pinker 2002). Philosophy's task is, among other things, to examine the assumptions of human practices including its own. In that vein I am interested in showing how Hegel can be seen as someone offering a challenge to our contemporary philosophical culture and its underlying naturalist premise.Of course that Hegel never explicitly talks about naturalism in his writings already presents us with the problem of risking anachronism. The other great problem is the fact that naturalism is an elusive philosophical position. There are a few different versions of the key theses of naturalism, so that if our aim is to diagnose Hegel's philosophy as naturalist or anti-naturalist it would seem we have to pick which version of naturalism we are going to work with. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against Terry Pinkard's account of the relation between Deweyian pragmatism and Hegelian idealism. Instead of thinking that their affinity concerns the issue of normative authority, as Pinkard does, I argue that we should trace their affinity to Dewey's appropriation of Hegel's naturalism, especially his theory of habits. Pinkard is not in a position to appreciate this affinity because he misreads Dewey as an instrumentalist, and his social-constructivist account of Hegel – which he shares with Pippin (...) and Brandom, is not able to correctly take the measure of Hegel's naturalism. On my reading, Dewey's philosophy is concerned above all with understanding and making objective the proper relation between reason and habit, with our achieving an equipoise in which thought is informed by intelligent habits and where habits are instituted by past thought and inquiry. In achieving this equipoise, one's bodily nature becomes a form in which subjects can realize their freedom. I claim.. (shrink)

A recently widely accepted view has it that the nature-spirit distinction in Hegel is to be understood as a distinction between a space or realm that is not normative or does not involve norms, and one that is or does. Notwithstanding the merits of this view, it has tended to create a separation between nature and spirit which is both philosophically troubling and difficult to reconcile with the picture of Hegel as the arch enemy of abstract or unreconciled dualisms. In (...) this paper I aim to show that the defining phenomenon for this view—collective self-government by norms—is on Hegel’s account both dependent on living nature that involves normativity broadly conceived all the way down and also subject to the normative or evaluative super-principle of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit—concrete freedom—the essence of spirit according to him. This is to say that for Hegel the normativity of collectively administered norms is neither the most basic nor the highest form of normativity. -/- Published online first 27 January 2021. (shrink)