French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception Book

Paul Redding's Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought, APRHT, is a systematic appraisal of the philosophically sophisticated Pittsburgh School readings of Hegel by Robert Brandom and John McDowell. While this would seem to imply that the work is derivative of the dominant analytic secondary literature on Hegel this is not true in the case of APRHT. The book makes several valuable contributions to contemporary Hegel scholarship.

Some of these are: i> Bringing out the unity of lower-order singular perceptual cognitions and higher-order universal conceptual cognitions in Hegel's work, contra Brandom's account in which socially instituted conceptual norms are both necessary and sufficient to robustly determine the content of perceptual cognitions. ii> Rehabilitating Hegel's metaphysical claim of equivalence between what is conceptually cognisable and what actually is, by showing how Hegel cashes out the ontological status of higher-order regulative epistemic concepts in terms of the role they play in determining the semantics of lower-order perceptual cognitions. iii> Revealing Hegel's organizing principle of "cognitive contextualism" which allows him to deploy different logical systems for inquiry in different domains. iv> Showing that the learned confusion about Hegel's notion of determinate negation, or negation of negation, in the literature stems from Hegel's use of the Aristotelian term logical notion of negation, rather than the truth functional negation operator used in modern propositional logics to develop the mechanics of determinate negation.

Points iii> and iv> are vital because they hit a deep vein in Hegel's work, providing a uniquely illuminating insight into Hegel's turgid and sometimes equivocal discourse, which uses term logic to talk about perceptual cognitions and propositional logic to talk about conceptual cognitions. This distinction also tells us where exactly the Pittsburgh School Neo-Hegelians' interpretations of Hegel betray the metaphysical ambitions of Hegelianism. For, term logical locutions may be negated in two ways: firstly one may negate the subject of the statement, secondly one may negate the predicate which is applied to the subject in the statement. While, propositional logical locutions can only be negated by treating the entire statement as false if true, or true if false.

The upshot is that perceptual cognitions, in which negation can apply to either the subject or the predicate, are mediated for each individual by his adherence to epistemic norms endorsed by his community. While conceptual cognitions are mediated by each individual's ability to defend his claims when they are contested by others who have equal right to an opinion on the matter in virtue of their common endorsement of the norms prescribed by the recognitive community. The asymmetry of the fallible, top-down, lower-order perceptual cognitions of individuals with respect to the authoritative, bottom-up, higher-order regulative conceptual cognitions of the recognitive community to which they are answerable is what sets up the stage for Hegel's daedal methodological innovation: the dialectic.

In summary, this work is essential reading for anyone interested in Hegel, Kant, Brandom, McDowell, analytic philosophy, and normative functionalism.