Hegel's philosophical achievement
pp. 556-574
in: Matthew C. Altman (ed), The Palgrave handbook of German idealism, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
Hegel's philosophical achievement is not only hard to state economically. Hegel is among the few modern philosophers about whom there is a dispute as to whether he achieved anything at all. Hegel has been, to be sure, one of the most influential of all modern philosophers. However, it is by now a well-known and even rather tired claim that the heroic founders of contemporary analytic philosophy — Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore — not only explicitly rejected Hegelianism but accused it of more or less complete charlatanry, and that this view stuck among their intellectual descendants. (The only other major figure who occupies such a contested place in the canon is probably Martin Heidegger.)
