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.

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The general idea summarily introduced here-that we are the sorts of beings we are with our characteristic "self-consciousness" only on account of the fact that we exist "for" each other or, more specifically, are recognized or acknowledged (anerkannt) by each other, an idea we might refer to as the "acknowledgment condition" for self-consciousness-constitutes one of Hegel's central claims in the Phenomenology. This is a substantial claim indeed, and is at the heart of the thesis of "the sociality of reason". 2 It is, however, introduced in a seemingly arbitrarily way in the paragraph prior to the "Independence and Dependence" section, and at the conclusion of a discussion examining "desire" as a model for self-consciousness. Exactly why we are meant to accept the acknowledgment condition is, to say the least, far from clear, and while even a cursory reading of the famous lord and bondsman "dialectic" that follows enables one to get the general picture, the philosophical significance we are meant to extract from it is not obvious. In Hegel's exploration of the nature and conditions of self-consciousness in these pages, much hangs on his use of the terms "being-in-itself", "being-for-itself", and "being-for-another", but as with so many of Hegel's characteristic expressions, while it is easy enough to get an

We reconstruct Hegel's implicit version of the ontological argument in the light of his anti-representationalist idealist metaphysics. For Hegel, the ontological argument had been a peculiarly modern form of argument for the existence of God, presupposing a ‘representationalist’ account of the mind and its concepts. As such, it was susceptible to Kant's famous refutation, but Kant himself had provided a model for an alternative conception of concept, one developed by Fichte with his notion of the I=I. We reconstruct an Hegelian version of the ontological argument by considering the possibility of a Fichtean version, and then subjecting it to a critique based on Hegel's critical appropriation of Fichte's I=I.