Focusing on the origins of German idealism, this work posits Leibniz as a pivotal figure, challenging the traditional narrative that centers on Kant. Redding explores Leibniz's debates with Newton regarding space, time, and divinity, highlighting his blend of Platonic and Aristotelian thought. He illustrates how Kant's interpretation of Leibniz influenced his own transcendental idealism and shows how subsequent philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche grappled with Leibnizian concepts. This book provides a fresh perspective on the development of Continental philosophy.
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.
"Supporters of G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy have largely shied away from relating his logic to modern symbolic or mathematical approaches. While it has predominantly been the non-Greek discipline of algebra that has informed modern mathematical logic, philosopher Paul Redding argues that the approaches of Plato and Aristotle to logic were deeply shaped by the arithmetic and geometry of classical Greek culture. And by ignoring the fact that Hegel's logic also has this deep mathematical dimension, conventional Hegelians have missed some of Hegel's greatest insights. In Conceptual Harmonies, Redding develops an account of Hegel's logic against a classical and modern historical background that is rarely considered. He stresses Hegel's attention to the Platonic background of Aristotle's original syllogistic and beyond. He then links these Platonic elements to Leibniz's modern revitalization of the logical tradition and then to new forms of algebraic geometry emerging in Hegel's lifetime. Redding thereby reestablishes aspects of Hegel's philosophy that are essential if Hegel is to be taken as a thinker relevant not only to contemporary philosophy, but also to current philosophical conceptions of logic"--
This book advances recent revisionist interpretations of Hegelian philosophy, presenting Hegel's work as a revolutionary modernization of ancient thought initiated by Kant. Paul Redding argues that Hegel's application of hermeneutics, a new way of objectively understanding intentional human subjects, addressed the major challenges Kant faced in modernizing philosophy. This led to the establishment of a genuinely modern, hermeneutic, and "nonmetaphysical" philosophy. Redding describes Hegel's achievement as a development of Kant's philosophical revolution, akin to the "Copernican" shift in modern science. He highlights how the heterodox pantheistic views and hermeneutic social thought of the late eighteenth century created a fertile ground for the evolution of Kantian idealism in the works of Schelling and early Hegel. Redding contends that Hegel transcended Schelling's pantheistic metaphysics through the Phenomenology of Spirit, establishing a postmetaphysical hermeneutic philosophy. He also connects Hegel's social theory in the Philosophy of Right and the conceptual frameworks of the Science of Logic to the hermeneutic insights from the Phenomenology. This perspective clarifies Hegel's analyses of modernity and the modern state, offering a coherent framework that surpasses the views of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in modern social and political thought.
