Editors’ introduction

Summary

The purpose of this series is to help to make contemporary European philosophy intelligible to a wider audience in the English-speaking world, and to suggest its interest and importance in particular to those trained in analytical philosophy.

It is appropriate that the series should be inaugurated with a book on Hegel. For it is by reference to Hegel that one may indicate most starkly the difference between the two traditions to whose intercommunication the series seeks to contribute. The analytical philosophy of the contemporary Anglo-Saxon world was developed by Moore, Russell and others in revolt against idealism and the influence of Hegel at the turn of this century. It is true that the British and American idealists had already diverged considerably from Hegel, but their holistic philosophy was certainly Hegelian both in terminology and in aspiration. Moore and Russell themselves obviously owed most to a different tradition stemming from Hume. Nevertheless, they too were influenced by European contemporaries to whose writings they explicitly appealed in their revolt against the British Hegelians. In particular they admired two European philosophers who had very little sympathy for Hegelianism: Brentano in the case of Moore, and in the case of Russell, Frege.

Again, if we look at the modern origins of radicalism or anti-traditionalism in philosophical thought in the English-speaking world – and most of the philosophers of the Vienna Circle were political radicals as well as philosophically iconoclastic – we find another contrast which can be drawn by reference to Hegel. In England, philosophical opposition to ‘Establishment’ ways of thinking and patterns of influence was developed in opposition to Hegel rather than under his influence; the opposite has been true of the more Marxist-orientated philosophers in many European countries, for instance Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in France. In the mid- 1930s, just when Hegel's philosophy was being introduced seriously to the academic world in Paris, A. J. Ayer returned from Vienna to Oxford as a champion of the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, whose chief target of attack was precisely Hegel. It is true that logical positivism was short-lived in England; and even in the United States, to which several members of the Vienna Circle eventually escaped, it represented an important phase rather than a lasting school.