Hegel and the Modern Canon

Abstract

This essay traces the relationship between Hegel and some common portrayals of modern philosophy in the nineteenth century. I explain much of the rationale behind the neo-Kantian narrative of modern philosophy, and argue that the common division of modern philosophers into rationalists and empiricists executed a principally anti-Hegelian agenda. I then trace some failed attempts by anglophone philosophers to reconcile Hegel with the neo-Kantian history, in the interest of explaining Hegel’s subsequent unpopularity in England and America. Finally, I argue that recent attempts to read Hegel in Kantian terms often rest on a misguided appropriation of an anti-Hegelian historical narrative. In an essay that at least ought to have become a classic on the historiography of philosophy, Bruce Kuklick traced the historical development of the early modern canon in American academic philosophy. The objective of his essay was to account for the “entrenched” syllabus of an institutional standard: the Seven Figures who comprise modern philosophy as this exists in textbooks, anthologies, and university curricula. In accounting for the standard syllabus, Kuklick aimed to persuade historians of philosophy to view our canon as a product of historically specific debates, and thus open to various sorts of inquiry. He provided some tempting and plausible hypotheses concerning either historical conditions or programmatic rationales for the inclusion of precisely those seven philosophers. Hume, he related, re-entered our version of the canon in the middle of the nineteenth century due to the success of Mill’s criticisms of Hamilton. Although one should like to see a more detailed discussion of the impact of German neo-Kantianism on anglophone philosophy, Kuklick’s account of Kant’s later re-entry into the story probably touches upon a degree of truth. To put the matter briefly, American philosophers in