Paul Redding
Biographic Data
| ID | 1235741 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Redding |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Redding |
| SIGNATURE | REDDING P |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3368-4587 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Mathematical Confusions Behind a Common Misunderstanding of Idealism
The paper starts by questioning the highly influential but extremely misleading characterizations of Plato and Hegel by Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper. It is argued that mathematical assumptions concerning the ancient problem of the incommensurability of continuous and discrete quantities underlie the ways in which Russell and Popper portray the metaphysics of Plato and Hegel—Popper explicitly, and Russell implicitly, presupposing a particular …
Plato’s Mathematical Psychophysics of Color
Aristotle is often regarded as providing a potentially appropriate model for a naturalistic human psychology that is able to reconcile the commonly opposed normative or “manifest” and factual or “scientific” images of the world and restore to the world the qualities that constitute its value. Such Aristotelian features were taken up after Newton by Goethe in his Theory of Color in his attempt to restore the actual color to the world that had seem…
Could There Be Method Behind Kepler’s Cosmic Music
While Kepler is regarded as a major figure in standard historical accounts of the scientific revolution of early modern Europe, he is typically seen as having one foot in the new scientific culture and one in the old. In some of his work, Kepler appears, along with Galileo, to be on a trajectory towards Newton’s celestial mechanics. In addition to his advocacy of Copernicus’s heliocentrism, he appealed to physical causes in his explanations of th…
Hegel's Philosophy of Nature: A Critical Guide
Hegel's Philosophy of Nature constitutes the second part of his mature philosophical system presented in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and covers an exceptionally broad spectrum of themes and issues, as Hegel considers the content and structure of how humanity approaches nature and how nature is understood by humanity. The essays in this volume bring together various perspectives on Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, emphasizing its…
Hegel’s Keplerian Revolution in Philosophy
In this paper, I approach Hegel’s philosophy under the banner of a “Keplerian Revolution”, the implicit reference being, of course, to Kant’s supposed Copernican philosophical revolution. Kepler had been an early supporter of the Copernican paradigm in astronomy, but went well beyond his predecessor, and so is invoked here in an attempt to capture some of the important ways in which Hegel attempted to go beyond the philosophy of Kant. To make the…
Intuitionist and Classical Dimensions of Hegel’s Hybrid Logic
Hegel interpreters commonly reject attempts to situate Hegel’s logic in relation to modern movements. Appealing to his criticisms of the logic of Verstand or mere understanding with its fixed logical structure, Hegel’s logic, it is pointed out, was a logic of Vernunft or reason—a logic more at home in the thought of Plato and Aristotle than in modern mathematical forms. Contesting this implied dichotomy, it is here argued that the ancient roots o…
Actualist versus Naturalist and Conceptual Realist Interpretations of Hegel's Metaphysics
The understanding of Hegel's metaphysics that is here argued for—that it is a metaphysics of the actual world —may sound trivial or empty. To counter this, in part one the actualist reading of Hegel's idealism is opposed to two other currently popular interpretations, those of the naturalist and the conceptual realist respectively. While actualism shares motivations with each of these positions, it is argued that it is better equipped to capture …
The Objectivity of the Actual: Hegelianism as a Metaphysics of Modal Actualism
This paper focuses on the notion of objectivity from a modal point of view. It maintains that what is found desirable about objectivity can be better obtained from the notion of actuality, but only when the latter is understood in a modally rich way as somehow containing possible alternatives to it within itself. This approach contrasts, for example, with David Lewis's conception of possible worlds, which locates the actual within a broader conce…
Being the rope in a tug of war: Márkus and Rorty as readers of Hegel in the '70s, '80s and '90s
This paper gives a brief sketch of György Márkus's philosophical style as manifest in the context of his role within the revival of Hegelian philosophy in Sydney in the last decades of the 20th century. Written from the perspective of one of his students, this style is sharpened by the contrast with that of another philosopher who was influential in the Hegel revival around that time, Richard Rorty. It is suggested that the stark antithesis betwe…
Time and Modality in Hegel’s Account of Judgment
Since having been dismissed by Bertrand Russell in the early twentieth century, Hegel has rarely been considered as having views relevant for the core logical and metaphysical concerns of analytic philosophy. According to Russell, Hegel had an antiquated metaphysics that derived from a naïve acceptance of Aristotle’s subject-predicate conception of judgment—an approach that had been made redundant by the revolutionary work in logic by Frege. Howe…
Hegel’s Treatment of Predication Considered in the Light of a Logic for the Actual World
One prominent feature of analytic metaphysics in the second half of the twentieth century was the revival of metaphysical debate over modality, and in this paper I suggest that a particular position that emerged within this debate, ‘modal actualism’, bears a striking resemblance to the way that Hegel discusses modal notions in the final chapter of Book 2 of the Science of Logic , ‘ Wirklichkeit ’ or ‘Actuality’. Modal actualists opposed David Lew…
The Logic of Affect
Most attempts to trace the roots of current scientific approaches to the mind have ignored the contributions of post-Kantian German idealism. Paul Redding here shows the relevance of this philosophical tradition to an understanding of the mind and its embodiment as well as the relation of feeling to cognition.Redding observes how Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel struggled with the problem of reconciling Kant's normative approach to experience and tho…
Hegel’s Subjective Logic as a Logic for (Hegel’s) Philosophy of Mind
In the 1930s, C. I. Lewis, who was responsible for the revival of modal logic in the era of modern symbolic logic, characterized ‘intensional’ approaches to logic as typical of post-Leibnizian ‘continental philosophy’, in contrast to the ‘extensionalist’ approaches dominant in the British tradition. Indeed Lewis’s own work in this area had been inspired by the logic of his teacher, the American ‘Absolute Idealist’, Josiah Royce. Hegel’s ‘Subjecti…
Findlay’s Hegel: Idealism as Modal Actualism
Here, I suggest a hitherto relatively unexplored way beyond the opposed Aristotelian realist and Kantian idealist approaches that divide recent interpretations of the categories or “thought determinations” of Hegel’s Logic, by locating his idealism within the terrain of recent debates in modal metaphysics. In particular, I return to the outlook of the first philosopher to attempt to bring Hegel into the analytic conversation, John Niemeyer Findla…
Aristotelian Master and Stoic Slave: From Epistemic Assimilation to Cognitive Transformation
Hegel on Philosophy in History
In this volume honouring Robert Pippin, prominent philosophers such as John McDowell, Slavoj Žižek, Jonathan Lear, and Axel Honneth explore Hegel's proposals concerning the historical character of philosophy. Hegelian doctrines discussed include the purported end of art, Hegel's view of human history, including the history of philosophy as the history of freedom (or autonomy), and the nature of self-consciousness as realized in narrative or in ac…
The Role of Logic ‘Commonly So Called’ in Hegel's Science of Logic
This paper examines Hegel's accounts of the nature of judgements and inferences in the ‘subjective logic’ of the Science of Logic, and does so in light of the history of the tradition of formal logic to his time. It is argued that, contrary to the attitude often displayed by interpreters of Hegel's logic, it is important to understand the positive role played by formal logic, ‘logic commonly so called’, in Hegel's own conception of logic. It is a…
Hegel and the ontological argument for the existence of God
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 conc…
Pragmatism, Idealism, and the Modal Menace: Rorty, Brandom, and Truths about Photons
In a short exchange published in 2000, Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom differed over the status of “facts” in a world containing no speakers and, hence, no speech acts. While Brandom wanted to retain the meaningfulness of talk of “facts” or “truths” about things—in this case truths about photons—in a world in which there could be no claimings about such things, Rorty denied the existence of any such “worldly items” as “facts.” In this essay the …
The Necessity of History for Philosophy – Even Analytic Philosophy
Analytic philosophers are often said to be indifferent or even hostile to the history of philosophy – that is, not to the idea of history of philosophy as such, but regarded as a species of the genus philosophy rather than the genus history . Here it is argued that such an attitude is actually inconsistent with approaches within the philosophies of mind that are typical within analytic philosophy. It is suggested that the common “argument rather …
Wilfrid Sellars's disambiguation of Kant's "intuition". Its relevance for the analysis of perceptual content
Wilfrid Sellars riteneva che le intuizioni kantiane fossero ambigue: un'intuizione, secondo una certa lettura, č un aristotelico "questo in quanto tale". Ciň offre un modo per aggirare i noti problemi cui č esposta la spiegazione del contenuto percettivo - per altro verso sellarsiana (e kantiana) - data da McDowell. Questi prende in considerazione ma respinge il suggerimento di Sellars. Il problema che vi scorge puň essere tuttavia aggirato se si…
Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars
Book Review| January 01 2011 Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars John McDowell, Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. ix + 285 pp. Paul Redding Paul Redding Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2011) 120 (1): 137–140. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2010-023 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitt…
German Idealism
Politically, idealism would eventually be replaced by "materialism" in Karl Marx's transformation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's "absolute idealism," while philosophically idealism was replaced by various anti-idealist doctrines in the twentieth century. But idealism still has its advocates, one recent supporter, in claiming "idealism as modernism," essentially reinstating Friedrich Schlegel's assessment. For such a view, idealist philosophy,…
The History of Western Philosophy of Religion
An international team of over 100 leading scholars has been brought together to provide authoritative exposition of how history s most important philosophical thinkers from antiquity to the present day- have sought to analyse the concepts and tenets central to Western religious belief, especially Christianity. Volume 4 comprises an introduction, presenting an overview of Nineteenth-Century philosophy of religion, and a series of essays on Ninetee…
The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy examines Hegel within his broader historical and philosophical contexts. Covering all major aspects of Hegel's philosophy, the volume provides an introduction to his logic, epistemology, philosophy of mind, social and political philosophy, philosophy of nature and aesthetics. It includes essays by an internationally recognised team of Hegel scholars. The volume begins with Terry P…
The Logic of Affect
Most attempts to trace the roots of current scientific approaches to the mind have ignored the contributions of post-Kantian German idealism. Paul Redding here shows the relevance of this philosophical tradition to an understanding of the mind and its embodiment as well as the relation of feeling to cognition.Redding observes how Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel struggled with the problem of reconciling Kant's normative approach to experience and tho…
The Role of Logic ‘Commonly So Called’ in Hegel's Science of Logic
This paper examines Hegel's accounts of the nature of judgements and inferences in the ‘subjective logic’ of the Science of Logic, and does so in light of the history of the tradition of formal logic to his time. It is argued that, contrary to the attitude often displayed by interpreters of Hegel's logic, it is important to understand the positive role played by formal logic, ‘logic commonly so called’, in Hegel's own conception of logic. It is a…
Findlay’s Hegel: Idealism as Modal Actualism
Here, I suggest a hitherto relatively unexplored way beyond the opposed Aristotelian realist and Kantian idealist approaches that divide recent interpretations of the categories or “thought determinations” of Hegel’s Logic, by locating his idealism within the terrain of recent debates in modal metaphysics. In particular, I return to the outlook of the first philosopher to attempt to bring Hegel into the analytic conversation, John Niemeyer Findla…
Hegel and the ontological argument for the existence of God
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 conc…
Action, Language and Text: Dilthey's conception of the understanding
Habermas, Lyotard, Wittgenstein: Philosophy at the Limits of Modernity
Habermas's theory of argumentation
Hegel's Hermeneutics
An advance on recent revisionist thinking about Hegelian philosophy, this book interprets Hegel's achievement as part of a revolutionary modernization of ancient philosophical thought initiated by Kant. In particular, Paul Redding argues that Hegel's use of hermeneutics, an emerging way of thinking objectively about intentional human subjects, overcame the major obstacle encountered by Kant in his attempt to modernize philosophy. The result was t…
Hegel's Hermeneutics
Eliminating emotions
Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory
This paper challenges the commonly made claim that the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development of Bourdieu's work from its earliest structuralist through its later ‘post-structuralist’ phase is better described in terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neo-Kantian to a distinctly Hegelian post-Kantian outlook. In his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to …
The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy examines Hegel within his broader historical and philosophical contexts. Covering all major aspects of Hegel's philosophy, the volume provides an introduction to his logic, epistemology, philosophy of mind, social and political philosophy, philosophy of nature and aesthetics. It includes essays by an internationally recognised team of Hegel scholars. The volume begins with Terry P…
The History of Western Philosophy of Religion
An international team of over 100 leading scholars has been brought together to provide authoritative exposition of how history s most important philosophical thinkers from antiquity to the present day- have sought to analyse the concepts and tenets central to Western religious belief, especially Christianity. Volume 4 comprises an introduction, presenting an overview of Nineteenth-Century philosophy of religion, and a series of essays on Ninetee…
Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars
Book Review| January 01 2011 Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars John McDowell, Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. ix + 285 pp. Paul Redding Paul Redding Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2011) 120 (1): 137–140. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2010-023 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitt…
German Idealism
Politically, idealism would eventually be replaced by "materialism" in Karl Marx's transformation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's "absolute idealism," while philosophically idealism was replaced by various anti-idealist doctrines in the twentieth century. But idealism still has its advocates, one recent supporter, in claiming "idealism as modernism," essentially reinstating Friedrich Schlegel's assessment. For such a view, idealist philosophy,…
Wilfrid Sellars's disambiguation of Kant's "intuition". Its relevance for the analysis of perceptual content
Wilfrid Sellars riteneva che le intuizioni kantiane fossero ambigue: un'intuizione, secondo una certa lettura, č un aristotelico "questo in quanto tale". Ciň offre un modo per aggirare i noti problemi cui č esposta la spiegazione del contenuto percettivo - per altro verso sellarsiana (e kantiana) - data da McDowell. Questi prende in considerazione ma respinge il suggerimento di Sellars. Il problema che vi scorge puň essere tuttavia aggirato se si…
The Necessity of History for Philosophy – Even Analytic Philosophy
Analytic philosophers are often said to be indifferent or even hostile to the history of philosophy – that is, not to the idea of history of philosophy as such, but regarded as a species of the genus philosophy rather than the genus history . Here it is argued that such an attitude is actually inconsistent with approaches within the philosophies of mind that are typical within analytic philosophy. It is suggested that the common “argument rather …
The Role of Logic ‘Commonly So Called’ in Hegel's Science of Logic
This paper examines Hegel's accounts of the nature of judgements and inferences in the ‘subjective logic’ of the Science of Logic, and does so in light of the history of the tradition of formal logic to his time. It is argued that, contrary to the attitude often displayed by interpreters of Hegel's logic, it is important to understand the positive role played by formal logic, ‘logic commonly so called’, in Hegel's own conception of logic. It is a…
Hegel and the ontological argument for the existence of God
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 conc…
Pragmatism, Idealism, and the Modal Menace: Rorty, Brandom, and Truths about Photons
In a short exchange published in 2000, Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom differed over the status of “facts” in a world containing no speakers and, hence, no speech acts. While Brandom wanted to retain the meaningfulness of talk of “facts” or “truths” about things—in this case truths about photons—in a world in which there could be no claimings about such things, Rorty denied the existence of any such “worldly items” as “facts.” In this essay the …
Aristotelian Master and Stoic Slave: From Epistemic Assimilation to Cognitive Transformation
Hegel on Philosophy in History
In this volume honouring Robert Pippin, prominent philosophers such as John McDowell, Slavoj Žižek, Jonathan Lear, and Axel Honneth explore Hegel's proposals concerning the historical character of philosophy. Hegelian doctrines discussed include the purported end of art, Hegel's view of human history, including the history of philosophy as the history of freedom (or autonomy), and the nature of self-consciousness as realized in narrative or in ac…
Findlay’s Hegel: Idealism as Modal Actualism
Here, I suggest a hitherto relatively unexplored way beyond the opposed Aristotelian realist and Kantian idealist approaches that divide recent interpretations of the categories or “thought determinations” of Hegel’s Logic, by locating his idealism within the terrain of recent debates in modal metaphysics. In particular, I return to the outlook of the first philosopher to attempt to bring Hegel into the analytic conversation, John Niemeyer Findla…
Hegel’s Subjective Logic as a Logic for (Hegel’s) Philosophy of Mind
In the 1930s, C. I. Lewis, who was responsible for the revival of modal logic in the era of modern symbolic logic, characterized ‘intensional’ approaches to logic as typical of post-Leibnizian ‘continental philosophy’, in contrast to the ‘extensionalist’ approaches dominant in the British tradition. Indeed Lewis’s own work in this area had been inspired by the logic of his teacher, the American ‘Absolute Idealist’, Josiah Royce. Hegel’s ‘Subjecti…
Time and Modality in Hegel’s Account of Judgment
Since having been dismissed by Bertrand Russell in the early twentieth century, Hegel has rarely been considered as having views relevant for the core logical and metaphysical concerns of analytic philosophy. According to Russell, Hegel had an antiquated metaphysics that derived from a naïve acceptance of Aristotle’s subject-predicate conception of judgment—an approach that had been made redundant by the revolutionary work in logic by Frege. Howe…
Hegel’s Treatment of Predication Considered in the Light of a Logic for the Actual World
One prominent feature of analytic metaphysics in the second half of the twentieth century was the revival of metaphysical debate over modality, and in this paper I suggest that a particular position that emerged within this debate, ‘modal actualism’, bears a striking resemblance to the way that Hegel discusses modal notions in the final chapter of Book 2 of the Science of Logic , ‘ Wirklichkeit ’ or ‘Actuality’. Modal actualists opposed David Lew…
The Logic of Affect
Most attempts to trace the roots of current scientific approaches to the mind have ignored the contributions of post-Kantian German idealism. Paul Redding here shows the relevance of this philosophical tradition to an understanding of the mind and its embodiment as well as the relation of feeling to cognition.Redding observes how Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel struggled with the problem of reconciling Kant's normative approach to experience and tho…
The Objectivity of the Actual: Hegelianism as a Metaphysics of Modal Actualism
This paper focuses on the notion of objectivity from a modal point of view. It maintains that what is found desirable about objectivity can be better obtained from the notion of actuality, but only when the latter is understood in a modally rich way as somehow containing possible alternatives to it within itself. This approach contrasts, for example, with David Lewis's conception of possible worlds, which locates the actual within a broader conce…
Being the rope in a tug of war: Márkus and Rorty as readers of Hegel in the '70s, '80s and '90s
This paper gives a brief sketch of György Márkus's philosophical style as manifest in the context of his role within the revival of Hegelian philosophy in Sydney in the last decades of the 20th century. Written from the perspective of one of his students, this style is sharpened by the contrast with that of another philosopher who was influential in the Hegel revival around that time, Richard Rorty. It is suggested that the stark antithesis betwe…
Epistemology (27 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · Hegelianism (20 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (14 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Metaphysics (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Classical Philosophy and Thought (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (6 works)