Abstract

For many recent readers of Hegel, Wilfrid Sellars’s 1956 London lectures on the “Myth of the Given” have signaled an important rapprochement between Hegelian and analytic traditions in philosophy. Here I want to explore the ideas of another philosopher, also active in London in the 1950s, who consciously pursued such a goal: John N. Findlay. The ideas that Findlay brought to Hegel—sometimes converging with, sometimes diverging from those of Sellars—had been informed by his earlier study of the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong, and transformations of Meinong’s ideas by his student, the logician Ernst Mally. These ideas that Findlay found Hegel-friendly are ones that have had a particular bearing on more recent analytic modal metaphysics, especially via the work of Findlay’s own former student, Arthur Prior. Given this, we might not be surprised at the similarities between the type of actualist interpretation of modal logic that Prior offered in opposition to David Lewis’s variant on Leibnizian possibilism, and Hegel’s approach to the category of “Actuality” [Wirklichkeit] at the end of the Objective Logic of The Science of Logic. But the similarities, I suggest, do not end there, as elements of Hegel treatment of predication in the Subjective Logic parallel similar elements found in the work of Mally and, more recently, “modal actualists” such as Prior and Stalnaker. In this paper I explore some puzzling features of Hegel’s treatment of predication in the Subjective Logic from the point of view of the need for a logic for thought about the modally complex actual world, as Hegel conceived it.