Framing: The Movement of the Whole
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Analytic philosophy defined itself through the rejection of Hegel — Russell’s polemics, Ayer’s verification principle, Popper’s critique of totalitarianism. But in the decades after 1950, it underwent a self-critique that — unintentionally — brought it closer to Hegel. The critique of empiricism (Quine), the critique of atomism (Davidson), the critique of essentialism (Kripke), the critique of rule-following (the later Wittgenstein) — all these movements undermined the foundations on which the rejection of Hegel had rested.
The result was paradoxical: the more analytic philosophy criticized its own presuppositions, the closer it moved to structures that Hegel had already developed. Holism instead of atomism, contextuality instead of foundationalism, social practice instead of individual consciousness, conceptual mediation instead of sensory immediacy — all of these are Hegelian insights, now reformulated in analytic terms.
This chapter traces this development: from Quine’s critique of the two dogmas of empiricism, through Davidson’s holism, to Kripke’s essentialism and the reception of Wittgenstein. It shows how the analytic tradition transformed itself from within — and thereby prepared the ground for the explicit Hegel renaissance in Volume III.