UC San Diego

The study of Hegel has recently undergone a renaissance within contemporary analytic philosophy. For a range of thinkers (including Brandom, Pinkard, Pippin and McDowell), Hegel can be seen as offering a creative and powerful account of fundamental topics in the analytic tradition such as consciousness, justification, and semantic content. The dominant paradigm used to justify this return to Hegel has been to interpret his project in The Phenomenology of Spirit as an anticipation of Sellars' critique of the myth of the given.

In my dissertation I argue that the new wave of interpreters are right to note that Hegel is concerned with questions central to the analytic tradition, but are wrong to motivate the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s work by appealing to its rejection of givenness. For I contend that Hegel actually accepts sophisticated versions of three forms of givenness: phenomenal, epistemological, and semantic. This can be seen by adopting a more phenomenological approach to Hegel’s texts—an approach which takes seriously Hegel’s claim that The Phenomenology of Spirit is a self-examination of consciousness. Through this approach I show how an interpretation can be constructed which is not only more faithful to the textual evidence but also credits Hegel with what I argue is an ultimately more satisfying philosophical account of key issues in epistemology and philosophy of mind.