Tuesday 19 June 2012

The Owl of Minerva and Cencrastus

In a blast from the past, I added a brief review of Michael Rosen's Hegel's Dialectic and its Criticism (1985) to Amazon. You may wish to improve on my memories, as at present what follows is the only review:

I read this book soon after it first appeared soon after graduating and it helped me to approach Hegel using the tools of the then current linguistic/analytic philosophy. The author compares Hegel and Theodor Adorno in terms of their departures from so-called ordinary language, regarding them as ultimately defective in method, but far from meaningless, as the positivist and some later accounts of metaphysical prose would have it. The work may be a little dated now in terms of philosophy of language, but served me well as an introduction to and commentary on an important and many-sided thinker.

My only note of criticism in retrospect would be that it has little to say on the socio-political side of Hegel, which is not unrelated to language, but that of course is not its stated subject-matter and the subjects it treats of deserve consideration in their own right.

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