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Barbara Hannan Cooke, Hegel and Mind: Rethinking Philosophical Psychology, by Richard Dien Winfield., Mind, Volume 122, Issue 488, October 2013, Pages 1216–1221, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzt103
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Analytic and continental philosophers are climbing the same mountain. Approaching from different sides, and using different equipment, they may unexpectedly meet at the summit. At the top of the mountain, around the philosophical campfire, John Searle and Hegel might discover unexpected common thoughts regarding the biological basis of mind and the impossibility of machine intelligence. Similarly, P. F. Strawson might find himself chatting amicably with Merleau-Ponty regarding the necessary embodiment of self-conscious individuals. Richard Dien Winfield illustrates such commonalities in this intriguing and valuable new book.
Analytic philosophers of mind typically ignore the post-Kantian German idealists. This is too bad. At least one of them, Schopenhauer, had some metaphysical insights that threatened to explode the Kantian framework within which he was officially working. In the education of analytic philosophers, the history of philosophy is typically dropped after Kant, and picked up again in the twentieth century with Wittgenstein, as if the nineteenth century had never happened. This is unfortunate. It is particularly annoying since Schopenhauer was such a powerful influence on Wittgenstein. Having argued all this in my own work (see Hannan, The Riddle of the World: A Reconsideration of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) I am gratified to see Winfield speaking up for the relevance to contemporary analytic philosophy of another post-Kantian German idealist, Hegel. (Schopenhauer considered Hegel to be an obscurantist charlatan, but that opinion was undoubtedly influenced by Schopenhauer’s bitter personal envy of Hegel’s success.)
