Preface to the English Edition

Summary

When I began outlining this book twelve years ago, there was little interest in Hegel among analytic philosophers in Germany, England, and the United States. I also quickly realized that Hegel researchers in Germany (at least the orthodox ones) were not inclined to engage in the debates and research results of analytic philosophy. Therefore, my motivating belief – that a dialogue between Hegelian and analytic philosophy would be fruitful for both sides – found little favor on either side.

In analytic circles, Hegel texts – which are admittedly difficult even for German readers – were taken to be incomprehensible, and his philosophical assumptions written off as simply obscure. This situation has fundamentally changed in the last decade. Robert Brandom and John McDowell, important representatives of contemporary analytic philosophy, have undertaken to draw productive systematic connections with Hegel's philosophy. The publications of Brandom and McDowell up to this point admittedly contain only rather general connections to Hegel's work; detailed analyses of, and confrontations with, Hegel's writings are still lacking from the side of analytic philosophy. Nonetheless, these thinkers have succeeded in awakening interest in Hegel's philosophy within analytic circles, and have weakened the a priori suspicion of meaningless to such an extent that a constructive dialogue between the two philosophical traditions can now be opened. But such a dialogue can, in my opinion, only be meaningful and successful when one engages in detailed and systematically oriented interpretations of central Hegelian texts and concepts.