¹ Bernstein, Richard J., ‘Why Hegel Now?’, The Review of Metaphysics 31 (1977), 29Google Scholar.

² Walter Kaufmann, ‘Coming to Terms With Hegel’, Times Literary Supplement, January 2^nd 1976, 13.

³ Bernstein, ‘Why Hegel Now?’, 35. Sellars, Wilfrid, ‘The Double-Knowledge Approach to the Mind-Body Problem’ New Scholasticism 45 (1971), 270CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Bernstein, ‘Why Hegel Now?’, 38.

⁵ Op. cit.

⁶ Op. cit.

⁷ Op. cit. 41. Rorty, Richard, ‘The World Well Lost’ Journal of Philosophy 69 (1972), 649–665CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Bernstein, ‘Why Hegel Now?,  42.

⁹ Op. cit. 43.

¹⁰ See for example Richard J Bernstein, ‘McDowell's Domesticated Hegelianism’, in N. H. Smith (ed.), Reading McDowell: On ‘Mind and World’ (London: Routledge, 2002), 9–24, and The Pragmatic Turn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 95–105.

¹¹ See ‘The Limits of Naturalism and the Metaphysics of German Idealism’, in E. Hammer (ed.), German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 19–49. For an equally pessimistic voice, on related grounds, see Frederick C. Beiser, ‘Introduction: The Puzzling Hegel Renaissance’, in F. C. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–14.

¹² This focus on value is also central to Gardner's treatment of German Idealism in his paper ‘From Kant to Post-Kantian Idealism I: German Idealism’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume, 76 (2002), 211–28Google Scholar. In this paper, Gardner argues that the theme of value also shows how German idealism and German romanticism can be seen to connect to one another in important ways, where he characterizes the latter position as follows: ‘German romanticism… insists on regarding value as in some sense an object of experience, and our relation to this object as teleological, i.e. such that the subject who enjoys consciousness of this object necessarily finds itself endowed with purposiveness by virtue of this relation… Value conceived as manifested in this objectual mode allows itself to be conceived more readily in a straightforwardly realist manner than value conceived in a strictly practical mode, and this satisfaction of the natural realism of pre-philosophical consciousness, in conjunction with the teleological dimension, is plausibly a ground for regarding the romantic world-view as of enduring philosophical importance’ (op. cit. 221–2).

¹³ Smith, Norman Kemp, ‘The Present Situation in Philosophy’ The Philosophical Review 29 (1920) 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cited Gardner, ‘The Limits of Naturalism’, 21. Cf. also Kemp Smith, ‘The Present Situation’, page 6, where he characterizes naturalism as ‘frankly revolutionary’, in trying ‘to trace moral distinctions to social conventions adopted for their beneficial consequences in forwarding the secular welfare of the individual and of society’; and page 18: ‘Naturalism has to treat human values as merely relative’; and page 20: ‘[for naturalism] should we attempt to consider moral or spiritual values in abstraction from the complex contingencies in which alone they are know to is, they lose all definiteness and meaning. They are so many forms of adaptation, and are as specific as the environment that prescribes and defines them’

¹⁴ Gardner ‘The Limits of Naturalism’, 34.

¹⁵ Cf. also ‘German Idealism’, 212–3: ‘There is also, among some of German idealism's defenders, a tendency to suppose that the best reconstruction of German idealism will be one that brings it into line with (and thereby shows it to be formative in the creation of) the post-metaphysical, broadly naturalistic climate which appears to be the legacy of both Anglophone and continental European philosophy of the last two centuries. This orientation is visible in some of the most striking recent work on Hegel’.

¹⁶ Cf. also ‘German Idealism’, 213: ‘The thesis that German idealism is value-driven, as I wish to understand it, comes into conflict with this post-metaphysical tendency, for reasons that will emerge’. Cf. also 228: ‘Third, it should be emphasised that the axiological reading entails a metaphysical, ontologically committed interpretation of German idealism: if German idealist metaphysics seeks to accommodate the axiological demand articulated in German romanticism, then a non-metaphysical, ontologically deflationary construal of German idealism, even if it were to make complete sense of the internal machinery of the German idealist systems, omits their prime mover and final end’. In this paper, Gardner uses Fichte's conception of positing as an example of the kind of ‘inflationary’ view that he thinks is required.

¹⁷ Cf. ‘The Present Situation of Philosophy’, where Kemp Smith remarks that he is ‘speaking as a convinced idealist’ (p. 6).

¹⁸ James Seth, A Study of Ethical Principles (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1905), 359–60 and 425. For other examples, see: J. R. Illingworth, Personality Human and Divine (London: Macmillan 1902), 110–11; Hastings Rashall, The Theory of Good and Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), II, 212; A. S. Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916), 42; W. R. Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1918), 352–3; A. E. Taylor, Does God Exist? (London: Macmillan, 1945), 92–3.

¹⁹ John Cottingham, Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 73.

²⁰ Gardner, ‘The Limits of Naturalism’, 37, referring to Terry Pinkard, ‘Speculative Naturphilosophie and the Development of the Empirical Sciences: Hegel's Perspective’, in G. Gutting (ed.), Continental Philosophy of Science (Oxford: Blackwell), 23 and 30.

²¹ Gardner, ‘The Limits of Naturalism’, 37–38.

²² Cf. Michael Thompson, Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 12: ‘The project of an “analytic” or “analytical” Hegelianism or of an “analytical Marxism” (however well- or ill-advised such a thing might be) must see itself as aiming at a form of analytic Aristotelianism…’

²³ G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, translated by T. F. Geraets, W A Suchting and H S Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), §179, p. 256.

²⁴ G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, translated by A. V. Miller (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), 661–2 (translation modified).

²⁵ Cf. Encyclopaedia Logic §21, 52, for a related passage from the introductory material: ‘When thinking is taken as active with regard to objects as the thinking over [Nachdenken] of something – then the universal, as the product of this activity – contains the value of the matter [Wert der Sache], what is essential [das Wesentliche], inner, true’.

²⁶ Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 27.

²⁷ Foot, Natural Goodness, 33.

²⁸ Thompson, Life and Action, 80–1.

²⁹ Rosalind Husthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 202.

³⁰ Foot herself put this worry as follows: ‘The questions remains, however, as to whether once we have made the transition from sub-rational to rational beings we may not need a new theory of evaluation. Surely, my critics will say, it must be so…. For such an evaluation [of sub-rational beings] is based on the general relation of this kind of feature to the pattern of life that is the good of creatures of this species. But how can we possibly see human good in the same terms? The life cycle of a plant or animal ultimately has to do with what is involved in development, self-sustenance, and reproduction. Are we really going to suggest that human strengths and weaknesses, and even virtues and vices, are to be identified by reference to such “biological” cycles?’ (Foot, Natural Goodness, 41)

³¹ Cf. Foot, Natural Goodness, 37: ‘There will surely be objection to the idea that a natural form of life characteristic of humankind could determine what you or I ought to do. What does it matter to me what species I belong to? Should we not protest on behalf of individuality and creativity against bringing in the human species when asking what I myself – this particular person – should do?’

³² This has been argued by Sebastian Rand in his article ‘What Is Wrong With Rex? Hegel on Animal Defect and Individuality’, European Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming (available online doi: 10.1111/ejop.12029).

³³ In her discussion, Hursthouse makes biology central to the naturalist view, and hence resists talk of ‘persons’ or ‘rational beings’, so to this extent her form of naturalism would be opposed to Hegel's: ‘But “ethical naturalism” is usually thought of as not only basing ethics in some way on considerations of human nature, but also as taking human beings to be part of the natural, biological order of living things. Its standard first premise is that what human beings are is a species of rational, social animals and thereby a species of living things – which unlike “persons” or “rational beings”, have a particular biological make-up and a natural life cycle’ (On Virtue Ethics, 206).

³⁴ Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §§5–7.

³⁵ Cf. Lenman, James, ‘The Saucer of Mud, the Kudzu Vine, and the Uxorious Cheetah: Against Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism in Meta-Ethics’, European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 1 (2005), 47Google Scholar.

³⁶ As Foot herself puts the worry: ‘Philosophers are sometimes afraid of recognizing teleological language, thinking it must be left over from a world-view in which all nature was seen as reflecting the will of the deity’ (Foot, Natural Goodness 32).

³⁷ Cf. James Kreines, ‘The Logic of Life: Hegel's Philosophical Defense of Teleological Explanation of Living Beings’, in Frederick C Beiser (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 344–378, and Reason in the World: Hegel's Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

³⁸ Kemp Smith, ‘The Present Situation in Philosophy’, 6.

³⁹ Foot, Natural Goodness, 51.

⁴⁰ Kemp Smith, ‘The Present Situation in Philosophy’, 15 (my emphasis).

⁴¹ Op. cit. 18.

⁴² Op. cit. 20.

⁴³ Op. cit. 23.

⁴⁴ Op. cit. 25.

⁴⁵ Cf. Axel Honneth, The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel's Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 27: ‘Hegel starts with the self-realization of the individual and derives the task of a modern legal system from these conditions of self-realization; the fact that in his case the communicative spheres come to the fore is due to the specific way in which he defines the structure of the freedom of the “free will”’.

⁴⁶ Foot, Natural Goodness, 16.

⁴⁷ John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 56–7.

⁴⁸ Cottingham, Philosophy of Religion, 86.

⁴⁹ ‘The rational state is an end in itself only because the highest stage of individual self-actualization consists in participating in the state and recognizing it as such an end. This means that Hegel's ethical theory is after all founded on a conception of individual human beings and their self-actualization’ (Allen W. Wood, Hegel's Ethical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 21).

⁵⁰ Cottingham, Philosophy of Religion, 85. For a related attempt to move naturalism about value in a theistic direction, see Fiona Ellis, God, Value, and Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

⁵¹ I am grateful to those who responded to this paper when it was delivered as a lecture, and those who read it in draft form, particularly Joe Saunders. Related ideas are discussed in my forthcoming papers ‘Does Hegelian Ethics Rest on a Mistake?’, in Italo Testa and Luigi Ruggiu (eds), I That Is We, We That is I: Contemporary Perspectives on Hegel (Leiden: Brill, 2016), and ‘Freedom, Norms and Nature in Hegel: Self-Legislation or Self-Realization?’, in James Kreines and Rachel Zuckert (eds), Hegel on Philosophy, History, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).