Robert Stern: Why Hegel Now (Again) - and in What Form? (Royal Institute of Philosophy)

Part of the Royal Institute of Philosophy's lecture series The History of Philosophy.
Writing in 1977, in response to the growing interest in Hegel within Anglo-American philosophy at the time, Richard J. Bernstein posed the question ‘Why Hegel Now?’, and gave the question a set of answers appropriate for the period. In view of the continuing and growing interest in Hegel today, one might be inclined to be similarly optimistic about the prospects for a positive relation between the two traditions. However, in a recent series of articles, Sebastian Gardner has raised significant reservations about any such optimism, focusing in particular on the gap he perceives between the dominant naturalism of the Anglo-American tradition on the one hand, and the view of value held by Hegel and the idealists on the other, which he claims commits Hegel to a conception of absolute spirit that is deeply at odds with any such naturalism. This conception is required, he argues, if idealism is to uphold the anti-perspectivalism about value which makes its position distinctive, and which is lost by various ‘soft naturalist’ accounts of idealism proposed by Pippin, Pinkard and others; but if this difference is taken seriously, it seems we must abandon Bernstein’s earlier optimism about a genuine rapprochement between Hegelian idealism and contemporary Anglo-American thought. My aim in this paper is to offer an account of value in Hegel that steers a middle way between these options, arguing that one can use Hegel’s treatment of value in the Logic to provide an account that is not perspectival on the one hand, but which is also not tied to any problematic conception of spirit on the other, and in fact has a close resemblance to the sort of Aristotelian view that also has a place in current Anglo-American philosophy in the work of Philippa Foot, Michael Thompson and others. As a result, it is argued, it is not inappropriate to think that the recent interest in Hegel within Anglo-American philosophy can be sustained, but perhaps on a rather different basis.
Filmed on 13th February, 2015