Reviews for Hegel's Idea of the Good Life

The average rating for Hegel's Idea of the Good Life based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-04-06 00:00:00 Theresa Crumpton Compact and versatile introduction to Ricoeur by one of his students and friends.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-02-03 00:00:00 Gregg Kolb Really clear and helpful exposition of the relationship between Quine's views and the logical positivists that came before him. I don't think his reading of the later Wittgenstein is fair, he is grouped with the other natural language people in ways that seem wrong, and I think is actually more similar to Quine than Romanos acknowledges (especially on the Ontological Relativity thesis). The points where they differ (other than methodology) are probably on some of Quine's more "radical" theses about indeterminacy of translation, which I do think are in part due to some behaviorist assumptions. The outstanding question then is whether correction of Quine's views to something less behaviorist results in a still deflationary view similar to Wittgenstein or Davidson (though it is unclear to me how deflationary Davidson is), or whether more robust theorizing about reference would be allowed if cog sci could tell us things about natural human object individuation. I still remain unsure about analytic/synthetic questions, and what exactly the implications of the claims being made on other side are. The discussion of Tarski was immensely helpful, and the most I've ever felt like I've understood Tarski, but made me come away feeling like Tarski is not that important at all? I need to read someone more on Tarski's side because I come away from this awfully skeptical. The vision of philosophy laid out at the end seems broadly correct to me (and fits with current focus on phil of mind/sci), though I think avoids some of the more specific questions about areas of fruitful inquiry and why philosophers should be able to provide insight into them. Throughout reading the book I wish I had a better understanding of how someone like Kripke, or someone like Brandom, would diverge from Quine's position (in opposite directions presumably), and I think I would need to get clearer on both to have a better grip on the "correctness" of all three enterprises. Romanos doesn't frame the ending conclusions as super deflationary, but I think they can be read as fairly deflationary and critical of much of existing philosophy in ways I find compelling. But my confidence on all of this is low - I still need to read much more of opposing views.