This volume is a collection of nine original essays, all concerned in different ways with connections between Hegel and the analytic tradition. It is a very good thing that there should be books considering these connections. Although Hegel is no longer a proscribed author among analytic philosophers, it is not considered a gap in an analytic philosopher's education if they have not read any Hegel. And there are parallel, though different, prejudices on the other side. Continental philosophers who work on Hegel will often be prepared to read a fair range of analytic philosophy, but they will tend to approach it with an already fixed and settled conviction of its shallowness and of its inadequacy to philosophy's great problems. So dialogue between traditions is certainly needed. Unfortunately, it is not quite so clear that this particular book advances the cause of such dialogue. Almost all the contributors to the volume are Hegel scholars, and not in any way analytic philosophers. This is, in fact, the heart of the book's problem: too few of these authors are familiar enough with work in the analytic tradition to bring about the philosophical engagement one might have hoped for.

I said that almost all the contributors to the volume are Hegel scholars, and not in any way analytic philosophers. The obvious exception is Joseph Margolis, who contributes the opening essay, ‘The Point of Hegel's Dissatisfaction with Kant’. This essay is too broad in scope to be considered in any detail here: it is a kind of summary and overview of Margolis's own philosophy, understood as a development of both Kant and Hegel. There is a large body of thought and argument behind it, as the extensive end-notes make clear, but the text itself is swift and telegraphic, sometimes a little dogmatic—and often quite hard to understand. The central claim is (roughly) that the foundation of Kant's enterprise is contingent and historical, which means, as Margolis puts it, that ‘transcendental necessities yield in the direction of dialectical necessities’, and that ‘Hegel trumps Kant; but in doing so, he trumps himself’ (34). There is not much about analytic philosophy here, but Margolis does in the end link the issues up with Putnam and Quine, in particular, discerning a kind of ‘inchoate pragmatism’ which underlies the strategies of both Kant and Hegel. Almost everything in Margolis's essay strikes me as controversial, from his interpretation of Kant, through his interpretation of Hegel, to his judgement of the truth about them. Readers should be prepared to disagree, and to puzzle over arguments, but there is a vision of philosophy and its history to be found here which is certainly worth paying attention to.

David Kolb's essay, ‘The Necessities of Hegel's Logics’, is at heart an exercise in Hegel scholarship and criticism. It has a little garnish of references to the analytic tradition in its opening pages, though these seem to me not altogether well-judged. The sentence ‘Current analytic philosophy tends to be Leibnizian in its ideas about modal necessity’ (41), for example, reveals an author not fully at home with his material: to use ‘modal’ in connection with ‘necessity’ is pleonastic, and the connection with Leibniz is the relatively trivial one that the favoured model theory for modal logic uses possible worlds (there is no general analytic commitment to Leibnizian rationalism, for example). The dish beneath this garnish strikes me as excellent, however: it is a challenge to the interpretation and defence of Hegel, associated above all with Stephen Houlgate, as constructing ‘a nonhistorical self-development of logical categories which provides an immanent self-development of the content of pure reason independent of any determining given or starting point’ (41). Kolb's complaint, put briefly and crudely, is that Hegel had to use an actual, existing, historical language, whose role in this ‘self-development’ cannot be ignored. I have no doubt that Houlgate would find something to say in response, but this essay seems to me to make a well-informed, clearly set-out contribution to an important scholarly debate.

‘Vagueness and Meaning Variance in Hegel's Logic’, by Angelica Nuzzo (who also contributes a useful editor's introduction), is again fundamentally an exercise in Hegel scholarship: its connection with analytic philosophy is an invitation to analytic philosophy to participate in the debate. The core of her proposal is that Hegel's dialectic (she focusses here in particular on the beginning of the Science of Logic) should be seen as a process in, and transformative of, language. She says that such a process is made possible by the two features of language she mentions in her title: vagueness and meaning variance. Of these two, vagueness seems to be the more fundamental to her, since it seems to be required for meaning variance to be possible. She then draws connections with the interest which analytic philosophers have taken in vagueness, the idea apparently being that they will have something to contribute. It has to be said that this seems a slight connection between the two traditions: analytic philosophers have in general been concerned to understand how vagueness can make sense at all, and have focussed largely on the logical puzzles which have been associated with vagueness. It is not entirely clear how that kind of enquiry will advance, or be advanced by, an understanding of Hegel. What does seem more fruitful is a suggestion which Nuzzo throws out right towards the end of her essay, that language itself might be implicated in John McDowell's conception of the way in which judgement might be constrained by perception.

In ‘Hegel and “Natural Language”‘, John McCumber presents an account of Hegel's theory of the development of language, in support of the claim that ‘logic and language can …, in principle, be given wholly naturalistic, i.e., evolutionary, explanations’ (91). The intersection between this account of Hegel and analytic philosophy appears in McCumber's criticism of analytic philosophy of language for its failure to allow such an explanation of logic. It is hard not to think that McCumber's argument is question-begging: he presupposes that logic and language must be given evolutionary explanations in order to object to analytic philosophy of language that it fails to allow this, and then takes himself to have thereby shown that logic and language can be given evolutionary explanations. In fact the very idea of an evolutionary explanation of logic (as distinct from our ability to think logically) is extremely puzzling, but no hint of the difficulty appears here. Perhaps McCumber has dealt more fully with the issue elsewhere, though the speed and roughness with which analytic philosophers are summarized and dismissed is not encouraging. It might also have been helpful to find some engagement between Hegel's conception of word-meaning and the opposing arguments of certain analytic philosophers (notably Frege and Wittgenstein), which do not in any obvious way depend on ‘hypostasizing’ logic.

Terry Pinkard's ‘Hegel's Nonanalytic Option’ seems in its first two paragraphs to reject any engagement with the analytic tradition, but in fact provides the most thoughtful and thorough engagement with it of any essay in the book. What he rejects is any engagement with the usual stories about analytic philosophy's flight from Hegelianism with Moore and Russell. But what he provides is a thoughtful reading of the Phenomenology which is clearly in tune with, if not solely (or perhaps even largely) informed by, some of the most Hegelian of recent positive work in the analytic tradition, that of McDowell. And he sees what is revolutionary about Hegel's approach to philosophy—what Hegel failed in, in that it has not transformed all subsequent philosophy—as at least continuous with Wittgenstein's rejection of traditional analysis, and his use instead of the notion of a form of life. Perhaps better Hegel scholars than me will reject Pinkard's approach to Hegel, but the whole way the issues are tackled here seems to me to be very well suited to bringing about the rapprochement between traditions which the book as a whole might be thought to be concerned with.

In ‘Unlikely Bedfellows? Putnam and Hegel on Natural Kind Terms’, Katherina Dulckeit takes Putnam's theory of natural-kind terms to be emblematic of analytic philosophy in general, and summarizes its central commitments in eight key theses. She then works through these eight theses in turn, to see where Hegel might stand on them. Of these eight theses, she leaves two on one side, since they express underlying philosophies so far apart that they will not ‘inspire a very satisfactory debate in this headlong clash of paradigms’ (127). Of the remainder, she finds that Hegel has anticipated Putnam in five of them, while on the last it turns out that it is Hegel, and not Putnam, who has the solution, since ‘it is Hegel, not Putnam, who examines how naming natural kinds is possible in the first place’ (129). And given that we are dealing with a ‘clash of paradigms’, Hegel also wins there, since ‘Hegel's dialectic of mediation gives him the unique ability’ to find a form of critique of a paradigm which is neither wholly within it, nor strictly from the outside (130). All this strikes me as just much too quick. First, the formulation of the eight theses attributed to Putnam seems to me awkward and contentious. Secondly, the claim that Hegel is dealing with the same issues as Putnam looks initially implausible, and not enough time is spent here making the case more thoroughly. Thirdly, it may be true that in some sense ‘it is Hegel, not Putnam, who examines how naming natural kinds, is possible in the first place’, but it is not clear, as Dulckeit alleges, that Putnam is anywhere close to an inconsistency in this: it seems to me more likely that he is just not addressing the same question. And finally, the whole Kuhnian classification of positions and traditions as ‘paradigms’, and the consequent raising of the issue of what it might be to question a paradigm, strikes me as not uncontentious: there must be something questionable about simply importing the framework of a historicizing philosophy of science in support of a historicist philosopher over a broadly anti-historicist school of philosophy.

Franca D'Agostini's ‘Was Hegel Noneist, Allist or Someist?’ raises questions about Hegel's stance on two issues in analytic metaphysics: the question of what exists, with a particular focus on Meinongianism; and the question of realism, as it is understood in the analytic tradition. Her interest in Meinongianism is part of her interest in Graham Priest's ‘dialethism’ (which champions a paraconsistent logic, which allows that some contradictions are true), but her paper is introduced rather oddly by way of David Lewis's critical discussion of the views of Richard Routley, whom Priest acknowledges as an inspiration (this is where the terms ‘noneism’, ‘allism’ and ‘someism’ come from). The introduction by way of Lewis is not a help: it would have been simpler to present Priest's Meinongianism directly. D'Agostini then uses Hegel's thesis that ‘what is real is rational, and what is rational is real’ to explain the sense in which Hegel might be thought to be realist or anti-realist. She claims that it allows him to be realist. And she then uses the same thesis to work out what Hegel would say about that paradigmatic Meinongian entity, the round square. It turns out that round squares exist ‘as conceptual entities’, but also cannot exist, because they only exist as limits of ontology (that is, as things which cannot exist). She concludes that ‘“round squares” represent a case of true (metatheoretical) contradiction: they mark the limits of a system, thereby indicating the truth of the system itself’ (153). I am a little puzzled about who this is aimed at. It seems unlikely that Hegel scholars will be deeply concerned about Hegel's view on the existence of round squares. And it is hard to imagine an analytic metaphysician being convinced by this particular adaptation of Meinongianism, or by this defence of the claim that Hegel is really a realist.

Tom Rockmore's ultimate goal appears to be to plead for Hegel's idealism to be taken seriously. The specific purpose of his essay in this volume, ‘Some Recent Analytic “Realist” Readings of Hegel’, is to remove from the path to that goal the obstruction which he takes to be presented by a range of analytic readings of Hegel. The problem is that analytic philosophy, according to Rockmore, has traditionally been committed to something called ‘metaphysical realism’, and recent analytic readings of Hegel have tended therefore to understand Hegel too as being a ‘metaphysical realist’. So Rockmore aims to undermine these analytic readings. He cannot in this paper consider every analytic reading of Hegel, so he focusses on just a ‘representative selection’—those of Frederick Beiser, Wilfred Sellars, Robert Brandom, and Kenneth Westphal. Every part of this exercise is problematic. It is unclear exactly what position Rockmore means by ‘metaphysical realism’: it is certainly not any position which is known by that name in the analytic tradition. Nor is it clear that there is any position which might reasonably be called ‘metaphysical realism’ which is a traditional commitment of the whole analytic tradition. It is also unclear in exactly what sense every recent analytic reading of Hegel can reasonably be said to read Hegel as a ‘metaphysical realist’. It is not clear that the four philosophers Rockmore singles out for attention can all be said to be analytic philosophers, or even that there is any tradition of which these four might reasonably be said to be representative. And when we get to the detailed consideration of two of these four (Sellars and Brandom), it seems to be supposed that someone cannot be entitled to consider a commitment of theirs Hegelian, if they also reject some other Hegelian commitment elsewhere. The whole essay is a sweeping rush of generalizations, punctuated by the occasional selective quotation.

In the final essay in the volume, ‘Hegel, Russell, and the Foundations of Philosophy’, Kenneth Westphal considers the ground of Russell's rejection of Hegel, and concludes that ‘Russell's central objections to Hegel's philosophy unwittingly illustrate and underscore the importance of some key points of Hegel's account of rational justification’ (189). Crucially, he argues that Russell's own conception of knowledge by acquaintance is vulnerable to the arguments of the Sense Certainty chapter of the Phenomenology. There are occasional infelicities (for example, the odd suggestion that Hume's Enquiries, but not his Treatise, are admired in the analytic tradition), and it may be that Westphal ends up overreaching himself and claiming more for Hegel against Russell than he is strictly entitled to, but this seems to me a good and useful example of engagement between two philosophical traditions.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the volume as a whole. There are a few insightful essays, as I have noted, but for the most part the book reads as if it is intended for people interested in Hegel who feel that they ought to know something about recent analytic engagements with Hegel; and for the most part it reads as if it is intended to reassure these people that they need not worry much about the analytic tradition after all. What is more seriously disturbing, however, is that very few of these authors seem to have any deep understanding of the analytic tradition at all. A few figures, problems and debates are singled out and taken to represent the whole tradition, when the very idea of such a representation is foreign to the tradition in question. And sadly, there is no real attempt, in any of these essays, to engage with the most obvious philosophical difference between Hegelians, on the one hand, and analytic philosophers in general, on the other: in their conceptions of the relation of philosophy to its history. It is a continuing scandal that analytic philosophers do not even apologize for knowing nothing of Hegel. But a volume like this may not be the best way to respond to that scandal.