The Owl of Minerva

Volume 42, Issue 1/2, 2010/2011

Hegel’s Anticipation of the Early History of Analytic Philosophy

The opening chapters of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit have for some time been taken as speaking to various concerns central to early analytic philosophy. In particular, Hegel’s diagnosis of the problems of “sense-certainty” has been read as anticipating the problems discovered within attempts like that in early Russell to found knowledge on some immediate “acquaintance” with “sense-data.” Here, utilizing a parallel between “shapes of consciousness” and “shapes of speech,” I extend the idea of such an Hegelian “anticipation” to that of a dialectic running through analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century.