Does Hegel appear much in any recent philosphical ideas?

Question

I read this thread, and especially Joseph's to the point answer, and wondered which recent philosophical ideas, like his list, take Hegel most seriously?

I'm asking because I recalled reading about the success of Hegel in winning over the philosophical establishment, his fame. I wondered if new ideas have more appeal with a bit of geist.

Answer 1

In the analytic world, Hegel is especially unpopular. There's a lot of reasons for this:

1. His robust commitment to metaphysics
2. His writing style
3. His popularity at Oxford during the 19th and early 20th centuries (McTaggart, Bradley)

The third feature highlights how analytic philosophy was, in part, a reaction to the philosophical style of the British Idealists who followed Hegel.

But there's several different thinkers I can think of who have a positive relation with Hegel doing contemporary philosophy:

• John McDowell whose basic thesis in Mind and World is quite similar to Hegel
• Alasdair MacIntyre whose communitarian vision has major sympathies with Hegel
• Charles Taylor who is a Hegel scholar but is more famous for writing about changing ideas in culture
• Robert Brandom - also at U. Pitt. is a contemporary philosopher influenced by Hegel
• Wilfrid Sellars also has some Hegelian background
• Jurgen Habermas operates from a Hegel-modified Kantian framework

There's quite a few more (limiting ourselves just to people who write about Hegel in English), but this is just to mention some famous philosophers who are working on Hegel.

If we're looking at people who directly do Hegel work, then:

• Robert Pippin - traditional Hegel exegisis (his wikipedia says "analytic" but I think they are just using that to indicate he's not impossibly difficult to read).
• Merold Westphal - some Hegel exigesis
• Kenneth Westphal (no relation between the two Westphals, also no relation to Joe Westphal who does Kierkegaard work) - analytic work on Hegel
• Tom Brooks - analytic + systemic rather than piecemeal work on Hegel
• Frederick Beiser - traditional Hegel scholarship
• Adrian Peperzak - traditional Hegel scholarship
• Allen Wood - did (past tense) a decent amount of work on Hegel -- you can trace the trajectory of his view by comparing Hegel's Ethical Theory with Kant's Ethical Theory (titles of two of his books).

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For more, see the Introduction to Adrian Peperzak's Modern Freedom and H. S. Harris, "The Hegel Renaissance in the Anglo-Saxon World since 1945," in T 01vl of Mine a 15 (1983-84): 77-106.