My research takes as its guiding thread the statement from Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of spirit of 1805-06, that «cognition is recognition[Erkennen ist Anerkennen]». In this perspective I delineate, first, the consequences of this position for Hegel's epistemology, in particular with reference to the question of skepticism. Then, I show in what sense the recognitive conception of knowledge makes it possible for Hegel to comprehend unitarily, on one hand, cognition as exercise of natural capacities and cognition as exercise of (...) normative capacities socially articulated, and,on the other hand, theoretical self-consciousness and practical self-consciousness. The gnoseological importance of this solution can be comprehended only if we reconstruct the evolution of Hegel's thought in that span of time in which he most directly tackles the issue of skepsis: that is, from 1797 - the beginning of his Frankfurt period - when he began to occupy himself with gnoseological questions, until the end of his stay in Jena,which begins in 1801 and concludes in 1807 with the writing of the Phenomenology. The analysis of the development of the Hegelian theory of knowledge - worked out in the first part of my study - is dealt with in the context of a reconstruction of the historico-argumentative constellation within which it matured. The constellation of importance for our analysis is represented by the skeptical crisis - triggered by authors such as Schulze, Maimonand Platner - that invested the post-Kantian galaxy, within which the idealist solutions to the problem of cognition matured. Through the analysis of journals and authors with whom Hegel came directly or indirectly into contact - from Platner to Reinhold, Jacobi, Fichte and Schelling, to Hölderlin and Sinclair, concluding with Zeender, Krug, Bouterwek and Werneburg, and among the journals Fülleborn's Beiträge and Niethammer's Journal in particular - it is possible to map the various solutions proposed for the skeptical problem andsee how it is in relation to this problem that the conceptions of self-consciousness evolve and the very concept of "interpersonality" - "intersubjectivity" - emerges for the first time. At the same time, pursuing my objective of broadening the investigation of the phenomenon of recognition, which in my view is not reducible to the field of practical philosophy, I proposea fresh reconstruction of the lexical and conceptual evolution of the various terms -Erkennen, Wiedererkennen, Recognition, Anerkennen - through which the various modalities of the phenomenon of recognition were indicated in the philosophical tradition to which Hegel refers: recognition of objects as perceptive reidentification; reminiscence on the level of theory of memory; recognition of subjects as self-recognition (apperception) and attribution to others of intentionality; logical recognition as recognition of the validity of a proposition; moral recognition, where "recognizing" generally means approving, accepting(more specifically, someone may be "recognized" as an autonomous subject and as a unique,genuine individuality). I focus in particular on the theory of memory as «recognitio» in Wolff and in his school, on the conception of «reconnaissance» in Bonnet, on Kantian«Recognition» and on the theory of «Anerkennen» in Ernst Platner. This investigation serves, on the one hand, to show how the phenomenon of recognition is central for a comprehension of the structure both of the lower and of the higher cognitive faculties. This ought to allow us to understand in what sense Hegel, taking intersubjective recognition as hisleading phenomenon, attempts to reunite the various meanings of recognition within a theory of knowledge on the basis of which «cognition is recognition». On the other hand, my conceptual and lexicographic investigation also serves to bring to light - in a new way with respect to the studies on Anerkennung - a hitherto unknown problematic constellation and the input of certain authors, such as Werneburg and Platner, whose conceptions may haveinfluenced Hegel's approach.The second part and the third of my study - a reconstruction of the pre- phenomenological Jena writings dealing with «Anerkennung» - dwells on the theme of the notion of natural recognition, whose centrality for the Hegelian conception of recognition has not yet been adequately grasped. This reconstruction of the theory of natural recognition gives due weight to the influence of Schelling on Hegel's understanding of «Anerkennung» -while the critical literature has generally concentrated on Fichte. Analyzing the conception of the animal organism developed in particular in the lectures on the philosophy of nature of 1803-04 brings to light how Hegel already individuates the recognitive phenomenon at the level of sexual reproduction: it is from here that he posits the natural prerequisites for the development of consciousness of self. The category of natural recognition will present itself anew in Hegel's analysis of the social ontology of the human world in the philosophy of spirit, where it concerns sexual love, reproduction and child raising: natural recognition is, then, that on the basis of which Hegel develops his theory that cognition is recognition.Recognition, as a «middle» of spirit, is a cognitive phenomenon that is primitive with respectto linguistically structured human intersubjectivity; it is, properly, that cognitive structure which is necessarily presupposed by a self-conscious subjectivity that expresses itself linguistically: linguistic intersubjectivity expresses various modes of recognition, but notevery form of recognition is linguistic. The evolutional theory of cognition as recognition is in fact designed to show how increasingly complex recognitive relations emerge from a basic level of natural interactions to take on a linguistically mediated and universal structure. Withthe notion of spiritual recognition Hegel indicates just that ensemble of normative relations that constitute the infrastructure of action and thus mediate the formation of socially articulated self-conscious knowing of self. In the lectures on the philosophy of spirit of 1803-04 and of 1805-06 Hegel thus reconstructs the recognitive structure of the social institutions of right, of labor, and of exchange, showing that, within a politically structured community,dyadic (I-you) interactions are mediated by the universal viewpoint of the "we" incarnated in institutions that can be recognized by citizens as their own and by which citizens can be recognized. (shrink)

This book shows that, far from repudiating Hegel, Dewey's entire pragmatic philosophy is premised on a "philosophy of spirit" inspired by Hegel's project.

This is a paradigmatic work of contemporary philosophy.

“Hildebrand has constructed a well-paced and historically informative evaluation of neopragmatism. . . . This book makes an excellent companion for courses in both contemporary epistemology and American philosophy.” –Choice How faithful are the Neopragmatists' reformulations of Classical Pragmatism? Can their Neopragmatisms work? In examining the difficulties in Neopragmatism, David L. Hildebrand is able to propose some distinct directions for Pragmatism.

A work in the history of systematic philosophy that is itself animated by a systematic philosophic aspiration, this book by one of the most prominent American ...

In this essay, Jim Garrison explores the emerging scholarship establishing a Hegelian continuity in John Dewey’s thought from his earliest publications to the work published in the last decade of his life. The primary goals of this study are, first, to introduce this new scholarship to philosophers of education and, second, to extend this analysis to new domains, including Dewey’s theory of inquiry, universals, and creative action. Ultimately, Garrison’s analysis also refutes the traditional account that claims that William James converted (...) Dewey from Hegelian idealism, after which Charles Sanders Peirce inspired him to rebuild his instrumentalism along radically different lines. (shrink)

In this paper I claim that Hegel's emergent and dialectical understanding of self-consciousness occurs in the thought of John Dewey, albeit in naturalized form. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Dewey's talk of the self, consciousness, and self-consciousness as it is developed in Experience and Nature together with some attention to Dewey's other great experiential text Art as Experience, will form the contexts for my claim. I do not argue that Dewey reproduces Hegel's dialectic or that Dewey's notion of self-consciousness emerges (...) as isomorphic with Hegel's own. In fact, Dewey's understanding of consciousness and self-consciousness lead me to conclude that for Dewey these are roughly equivalent to experimental .. (shrink)

We propose to extend Clark and Chalmer’s concept of the extended mind to consider the possibility that social institutions (e.g., legal systems, museums) may operate in ways similar to the hand-held conveniences (notebooks, calculators) that are often used as examples of extended mind. The inspiration for this suggestion can be found in the writings of Hegel on “objective spirit” which involves the mind in a constant process of externalizing and internalizing. For Hegel, social institutions are pieces of the mind, externalized (...) in their specific time and place. These institutions are the products of shared mental processes. We then use these institutions instrumentally to do further cognitive work, for example, to solve problems or to control behavior. (shrink)

Introduction -- Pragmatism and science -- Pragmatic philosophy of science and the charge of scientism -- John Dewey and American psychology -- John Dewey and American social science -- Culture and nature -- Not another epistemology -- Naturalism and subjectivism -- Naturalizing epistemology : recent developments in psychology and the sociology of knowledge -- Democracy -- American democracy : a new spirit in the world -- John Dewey : anarchism and the political state -- Philosophy and politics : a historical (...) approach to Marx and Dewey -- John Dewey and the problem of justice -- Liberalism's discontent : America in search for past that never was -- Why not Dewey? -- The evasion of philosophy -- Democratic hope -- Analytic pragmatism -- Post-modern pragmatism. (shrink)

While previous studies of Dewey's work have taken either a historical or topical focus, Shook offers an innovative, organic approach to understanding Dewey and eloquently shows that Dewey's instrumentalism grew seamlessly out of his idealism. He argues that most current scholarship operates under a mistaken impression of Dewey's early philosophical positions.

This study demonstrates that Dewey did not reject Hegelianism during the 1890s, as scholars maintain, but developed a humanistic/historicist reading that was indebted to an American Hegelian tradition. Scholars have misunderstood the "permanent Hegelian deposit" in Dewey's thought because they have not fully appreciated this American Hegelian tradition and have assumed that his Hegelianism was based primarily on British neo-Hegelianism. ;The study examines the American reception of Hegel in the nineteenth-century by intellectuals as diverse as James Marsh and Frederic Henry (...) Hedge and how it flowered in late nineteenth-century St. Louis. The St. Louis Hegelians read Hegel as a particularly practical and politically liberal philosopher whose social philosophy promoted both social diversity and unity. Led by W. T. Harris, they studied Hegel in German and published their own scholarship, as well as translations of German scholarship, in their Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Their efforts to make "Hegel talk English" and to base the St. Louis public schools on Hegel's philosophy of education won them national, and even, international attention. The St. Louis Hegelians sought to adapt Hegel's thought to their American context by assuaging elitist elements within it; Dewey's intellectual development was profoundly shaped by their appropriation of his philosophy. ;Dewey drew upon Hegel's argument that humans form societies because of their differences, not in spite of them. Hegel's rejection of the self-sufficient, atomistic individual entailed that the individual is dependent upon others for the satisfaction of material needs. Moreover, like Hegel, Dewey rejected the hedonistic basis of the British political tradition by arguing that humans seek recognition from their equals as well as satisfaction of material needs. Dewey believed Hegel's emphasis upon equality and diversity provided a model of society in which there was fertile ground for the individual to conceive and articulate cultural criticism. The study ends by comparing recent Hegel scholarship to Dewey's, demonstrating that American Hegelianism has returned, in important ways, to a Deweyan reading of Hegel. (shrink)

Developments over the past four decades have secured Immanuel Kant’s status as being for contemporary philosophers what the sea was for Swinburne: the great, gray mother of us all. And Kant mattered as much for the classical American pragmatists as he does for us today. But we look back at that sepia-toned age across an extended period during which Anglophone philosophy largely wrote Kant out of its canon. The founding ideology of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, articulating the rationale and (...) fighting faith for the rising tide of analytic philosophy, was forged in a recoil from the perceived defects of a British idealism inspired by Hegel. Mindful of the massive debt evidently and self-avowedly owed by Hegel to Kant, and putting aside neo-Kantian readings of Kant as an empiricist philosopher of science that cast him in a light they would have found more favorable, Russell and Moore diagnosed the idealist rot as having set in already with Kant. For them, and for many of their followers down through the years, the progressive current in philosophy should be seen to have run directly from Locke, Leibniz, and Hume, to Mill and Frege, without any dangerous diversion into the oxbow of German idealism. (shrink)

This book explains the relationship between intelligence and environmental complexity, and in so doing links philosophy of mind to more general issues about the relations between organisms and environments, and to the general pattern of 'externalist' explanations. The author provides a biological approach to the investigation of mind and cognition in nature. In particular he explores the idea that the function of cognition is to enable agents to deal with environmental complexity. The history of the idea in the work of (...) Dewey and Spencer is considered, as is the impact of recent evolutionary theory on our understanding of the place of mind in nature. (shrink)

On a souvent considéré qu'une philosophie de l'esprit devait choisir parmi les traits distinctifs du mental celui qu'elle retiendrait pour le mettre en relief. Il ne serait pas possible de faire place dans une même philosophie aux trois faits majeurs : l'intentionnalité du mental (on discerne les pensées de quelqu'un en disant à quoi il pense), le holisme du mental (impossible de concevoir un état d'esprit isolé du tout d'une vie mentale), la part impersonnelle du mental (les acteurs ne manifestent (...) pas seulement des capacités mentales attachées à leurs personnes respectives, mais aussi des manières de penser communes, des institutions de sens formant ce qu'on appelle un esprit objectif). Ainsi, les théories intentionalistes de l'esprit ont généralement exalté le sujet aux dépens des totalités symboliques, tandis que les théories des structures de l'esprit ont paru faire de l'acteur un simple figurant sur la scène du signifiant. De tels partis pris signalent l'échec de bien des philosophes à concevoir clairement les conditions d'une analyse holiste des phénomènes de l'esprit. Ce livre utilise les ressources analytiques de la logique des relations de C.S. Peirce pour développer une conception holiste de l'intentionnalité de l'esprit (tant subjectif qu'objectif). Ce faisant, il introduit, par l'analyse d'exemples plutôt que par un simple survol historique des doctrines, aux problèmes discutés dans les grandes philosophies de l'esprit de ce temps : phénoménologie, individualisme, structuralisme, pragmatisme. (shrink)

_Experience and Value: Essays on John Dewey and Pragmatic Naturalism _brings together twelve philosophical essays spanning the career of noted Dewey scholar, S. Morris Eames. The volume includes both critiques and interpretations of important issues in John Dewey’s value theory as well as the application of Eames’s pragmatic naturalism in addressing contemporary problems in social theory, education, and religion. The collection begins with a discussion of the underlying principles of Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism, including the concepts of nature, experience, and philosophic (...) method. Essays “Experience and Philosophical Method in John Dewey” and “Primary Experience in the Philosophy of John Dewey” develop what Eames believed to be a central theme in Dewey’s thought and provide a theoretical framework for subsequent discussion. The volume continues with specific applications of this framework in the areas of value theory, moral theory, social philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. Eames’s analysis of value exposes the connection between the immediately felt values of experience and the more sophisticated judgments of value that are the product of reflection. From this basis in moral theory, Eames considers the derivation of judgments of obligation from judgments of fact. This discussion provides a grounding for a consideration of contemporary social issues directed by naturalistic and scientific principles. In the third section, with regard to educational theory, Eames considers possible resolutions of the current dichotomy between the factual worldview of science and the humanistic worldview of the liberal arts. The comprehensive article, “Dewey’s Views of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness,” connects the essays of the first and second sections and explores the placement of Dewey’s value theory with respect to morals and aesthetics. With “Creativity and Democracy,” in the fourth section, Eames also considers the concept of democracy from the standpoint of current and historical issues faced by society. This article hints at a major project of Eames’s intellectual life—the theory of democracy. The volume concludes with a discussion of the difficulty of maintaining the values of religious experience in a scientifically and technologically sophisticated world, the very topic that first brought Eames to philosophy—the meaning of religion and the religious life. Suggested solutions are offered in “The Lost Individual and Religious Unity.” _Experience and Value: Essays on John Dewey and Pragmatic Naturalism _illuminates Eames’ life of inquiry, a life that included moral, social, aesthetic, and religious dimensions of value—all suffused with the influence of John Dewey. _ _ __. (shrink)

Drawing on new evidence from the Dewey archive, this paper traces how John Dewey conceived his Hegelian-inspired theory of mind and how he tested it in the 1930s by collaborating with infant experimentalist Myrtle McGraw in her pioneering studies of the ontogeny of consciousness and judgment. Her studies challenged behaviourism and maturationism, which advanced environmental and genetic theories of human development, by showing that infants possess consciousness and the judgment needed to guide their own development. -/- Dewey drew on Darwinian (...) evolution and neuroscience to transform the Hegelian phenomenology of being and becoming into psychological terms that would elucidate the role of mind, consciousness and judgment in human experience. Dewey believed that consciousness arises under conditions of uncertainty demanding ingenuity, self-confidence and a sense of balance. McGraw demonstrated how infants cope with uncertainty and the physical challenges posed by gravity and the biological forces of growth, by exploiting the contingencies of order and variation afforded by their experience of motor development. McGraw demonstrated how consciousness emerges through reciprocal processes of neural and behavioural interaction which make possible the introduction of novel changes in ontogeny. -/- This paper describes the extraordinary methods that McGraw devised, with Dewey's help, during the heyday of behaviourism and maturationism, to find a place for consciousness in human development. I contend that, while Dewey's theory of mind and McGraw's discoveries remain controversial and poorly understood, they are not merely of historical interest but approach the threshold of an integrated neurobiological and neurobehavioural understanding of consciousness. (shrink)

Demonstrates that the divisions between analytic and continental philosophy are being replaced by a transcontinental desire to address common problems in a common idiom.

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV.

This 2007 book examines the possibilities for the rehabilitation of Hegelian thought within analytic philosophy. From its inception, the analytic tradition has in general accepted Bertrand Russell's hostile dismissal of the idealists, based on the claim that their metaphysical views were irretrievably corrupted by the faulty logic that informed them. These assumptions are challenged by the work of such analytic philosophers as John McDowell and Robert Brandom, who, while contributing to core areas of the analytic movement, nevertheless have found in (...) Hegel sophisticated ideas that are able to address problems which still haunt the analytic tradition after a hundred years. Paul Redding traces the consequences of the displacement of the logic presupposed by Kant and Hegel by modern post-Fregean logic, and examines the developments within twentieth-century analytic philosophy which have made possible an analytic re-engagement with a previously dismissed philosophical tradition. (shrink)

This fresh and original book argues that the central questions in Hegel's practical philosophy are the central questions in modern accounts of freedom: What is freedom, or what would it be to act freely? Is it possible so to act? And how important is leading a free life? Robert Pippin argues that the core of Hegel's answers is a social theory of agency, the view that agency is not exclusively a matter of the self-relation and self-determination of an individual but (...) requires the right sort of engagement with and recognition by others. Using a detailed analysis of key Hegelian texts, he develops this interpretation to reveal the bearing of Hegel's claims on many contemporary issues, including much-discussed core problems in the liberal democratic tradition. His important study will be valuable for all readers who are interested in Hegel's philosophy and in the modern problems of agency and freedom. (shrink)

Although Richard Rorty has done much to renew interest in the philosophy of John Dewey, he nonetheless rejects two of the most important components of Dewey's philosophy, that is, his metaphysics and epistemology. Following George Santayana, Rorty accuses Dewey of trying to serve Locke and Hegel, an impossibility as Rorty rightly sees it. Rorty (1982) says that Dewey should have been Hegelian all the way (p. 85). By reconstructing a bit of Hegel's early philosophy of work, and comparing it to (...) Dewey's metaphysics and epistemology we can see that Dewey was indeed Hegelian all the way and that Rorty has constructed a false dilemma. We also gain some interesting insight into Dewey's philosophy by viewing it in terms of labor, tools and language. (shrink)

C'est un fait bien etabli maintenant que le titre commode d'idealisme allemand ne recouvre ni une unite monolithique de doctrines ni l'unite univoque d'un processus qui, passant par Fichte et Schelling, aurait trouve avec Hegel son seul accomplissement possible. Prenant pour fil conducteur la question de savoir comment doit commencer la philosophie et par quoi il faut commencer en philosophie, on tente ici une lecture comparee de Hegel et de Schelling avec l'ambition de rouvrir entre eux un dialogue rendant manifeste (...) que leur separation n'a pu avoir lieu que sur le fond de ce qui leur echut a tous deux egalement, a savoir la tache d'accomplir la philosophie comme science. La question du commencement philosophique est bien celle que seuls pouvaient veritablement poser ceux qui ont voulu conduire la philosophie a sa fin, a son accomplissement, c'est-a-dire Hegel et Schelling. (shrink)

This dissertation is a reconstruction of Hegel's theory of the individual knower. It takes the form of a commentary on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, a generally ignored section of Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The commentary tries to avoid the trap of explaining Hegel and Hegelian jargon, aiming at a reader familiar with the history of philosophy and the Anglo-American tradition in the philosophy of mind. ;My reconstruction of Hegel's theory shows it to be an attempt to pay (...) the insights of the post-Cartesian philosophy of mind their due, without, however, getting entangled in the aporia engendered by the Cartesian framework. The most repugnant consequence of this framework, against which Hegel fought forcefully, is the conception of the thing-in-itself. This conception arises from accepting a representationalist model of all mental activity, for then reality is forever closed off to the thinker. Yet Hegel does not simply discard respresentationalism; rather, he attempts to elaborate a theory in which certain activities of the individual thinker are decidedly representationalistic, in particular intuition, imagination, and elementary symbol use, but thinking itself is understood non-representationally. In his consideration of the representational activities of the mind, we find Hegel dealing with many of the problems familiar from the empiricists and Kant, such as how particular mental acts can represent universals, and offering a sophisticated theory of levels of representational complexity. ; In his battle against the Cartesian tradition, Hegel invoked two important Aristotelian themes. First, Hegel's philosophy of mind is methodologically naturalistic, in that it is methodologically continuous with this theory of nature; his philosophy of mind is not founded upon any direct revelation of the mind to itself. The individual thinker does not occur as an item of an entirely different kind superadded to nature. Second, Hegel adopts a teleological view of the world--allowing him to say that though nature is first, spirit, as telos, is prior--and in particular that the ultimate telos is a universal active reason which takes the form of thought thinking thought. Because he then identifies this universal thought as the very substance of the world, and holds that the mental activity of the individual thinker can become identical with--not just a representation of--this universal thinking activity, he holds that even in the individual, thought is not representational. (shrink)

This article examines the pragmatic conception of self. It describes the views of classical pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead on the concept of self. It explains the pragmatic concept of self reinforces the agentive idea that what we do makes us who we are. It suggests that there is no pre-established certainty in the self and that it is marked by fallibility. It outlines the pragmatist assault on the Cartesian picture of the self (...) and contrasts it with the fallible self of pragmatism. (shrink)

[Cause and effect], if they are distinct, are also identical. Even in ordinary consciousness that identity may be found. We say that a cause is a cause, only when it has an effect, and vice versa. Both cause and effect are thus one and the same content: and the distinction between them is primarily only that the one lays down, and the other is laid down.1In the quote above, Hegel claims that cause and effect are only distinct from a particular (...) point of view. A cause only becomes a cause when it has an effect, thus the two apparently opposing terms reverse their roles. The effect is the cause of the cause, and the cause is the effect of its own effect. This article begins with a discussion of what we believe to be .. (shrink)

As one of America’s "public intellectuals," John Dewey was engaged in a lifelong struggle to understand the human mind and the nature of human inquiry. According to Thomas C. Dalton, the successful pursuit of this mission demanded that Dewey become more than just a philosopher; it compelled him to become thoroughly familiar with the theories and methods of physics, psychology, and neurosciences, as well as become engaged in educational and social reform. Tapping archival sources and Dewey’s extensive correspondence, Dalton reveals (...) that Dewey had close personal and intellectual ties to scientists and scholars who helped form the mature expression of his thought. Dewey’s relationships with F. M. Alexander, Henri Matisse, Niels Bohr, Myrtle McGraw, and Lawrence K. Frank, among others, show how Dewey dispersed pragmatism throughout American thought and culture. (shrink)

The problem of freedom in modern philosophy has three basic components: (i) what is freedom, or what would it be to act freely? (ii) Is it possible so to act? (iii) And how important is leading a free life?1 Hegel proposed unprecedented and highly controversial answers to these questions.