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"--
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 the first genuinely modern, hermeneutic, and "nonmetaphysical" philosophy. Redding describes Hegel's accomplishment in terms of a development of Kant's revolution in philosophy, a "Copernican" revolution analogous to that which initiated modern science. He shows how the heterodox pantheistic views and hermeneutic social thought that merged at the end of the eighteenth century provided a fruitful environment for the transformation that Kantian idealism underwent within the work of Schelling and the early Hegel. He argues that Hegel overcame Schelling's pantheistic metaphysics with the Phenomenology of Spirit and developed a postmetaphysical hermeneutic mode of philosophy. Redding goes on to show how the social theory of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and the conceptual structures of his allegedly most metaphysical work, the Science of Logic, are systematically linked to the hermeneutic insights of the Phenomenology. Against this background, Hegel's works are freed from traditional misunderstandings. Redding demonstrates that Hegel's analyses of modernity and the modern state surpass the one-sided views of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, providing a coherent framework for modern social and political thought
