4162008- universityof pittsburgh（4162008——匹兹堡大学）（47页）.docVIP

8/29/2008 Hegel Seminar: Week One Part I: Why Hegel? My interest is not antiquarian, but philosophical. I think that Hegel has a lot to teach us about topics of substantial contemporary interest. In particular, I think he has extremely interesting and sophisticated views about the relations between the use of concepts and their contents. One way to think about the potential contemporary significance of Hegel is to come at the issue from the point of view of Sellars’s view of the significance of his own work. Sellars, when asked what he hoped the overall, eventual effect of his work would be, said that he hoped to help move analytic philosophy from its humean into its kantian phase. In his Introduction to my edition of Sellars’s masterwork Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Rorty has said that the effect of my work (and he is thinking also of McDowell here) might be to usher Anglophone philosophy from its incipient kantian phase into its hegelian phase. These remarks invite three questions: i) What does it mean to think of analytic philosophy as being in a humean phase? ii) What would it be for it to move to a kantian phase, and in what sense are we already moving in that direction? What then might be meant by a subsequent hegelian phase? The answer to the question of what it might mean to think of analytic philosophy as having a humean phase, I think, is that analytic philosophy can be thought of as a development in the empiricist tradition. Traditional Early Modern British Empiricism: Locke and Hume were not only empiricists, but in an important sense also naturalists. Kant famously complains that “the celebrated Mister Locke” describes the processes that lead to knowledge, and thinks thereby that he has assessed the rational credentials, the justification of what results from those processes. He runs together descriptive and normative issues. This is one sort of naturalism. Hume aspired to be the “Newton of the mind,” by describing the