ABSTRACT
I suspect that many of John McDowell’s “analytic,” and former Oxford, colleagues thought it was some sort of a joke when McDowell announced in the Preface to Mind and World “that I would like to conceive this work…as a prolegomenon to a reading of [Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit].”1 Hegel is a philosopher that few “analytic” philosophers have taken seriously (or even read)—a philosopher who is typically held up for ridicule, as someone who epitomizes the intellectual vices that “analytic” philosophy has sought to overcome. Or as McDowell himself more judiciously phrases it, Hegel is “someone we take almost no notice of, in the philosophical tradition I was brought up in” (p.111). McDowell’s reference to Hegel is no joke. I want to show how profoundly McDowell has been influenced by a line of thinking that is Hegelian, and that McDowell’s domesticated Hegelianism provides an essential clue for grasping the overall strategy and direction of his thinking. One of the many attractive features of McDowell’s thought is that he shows just how outdated and provincial the so-called “analyticcontinental split” is for philosophy today. There is good and bad philosophical thinking, and many of today’s most creative thinkers-like McDowell (and his colleague, Robert Brandom)—pay no attention to this artificial split; they incorporate ideas from what we have erroneously labeled two different traditions.2
