23 October 2017 1 Hegel and the Tractarian Conception of Judgment (DRAFT ONLY, COMMENTS WELCOME) Paul Redding Comparisons of the views of philosophers across the boundaries of time and culture and hazardous, and surely this applies especially in the case of Hegel and Wittgenstein. Hegel had been effectively eliminated from serious consideration early within the analytic movement during first half of the twentieth century, and part of this effect can be traced back to the influence of Wittgenstein. While Bertrand Russell had been keen to dissociate the new style of philosophy from Hegel, this antipathy had been consolidated by the positivist direction taken by analytic thought in the 1920s and 30s, a movement significantly influenced by Wittgenstein’s early great work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Exactly how to read the Tractatus has, of course, always been contested: the positivists seem to have understood it as providing a metaphysics-free semantic theory for the new logic introduced by Frege and Russell, while for Russell and others it was more a type of exercise in realist metaphysics. 1 However, from the 1950s, signs of a thaw in analytic attitudes to Hegel were starting to show, with the influence of Wittgenstein recognized here as well. In this case, it was, of course, via his later work, the influence of which spread after the publication of Philosophical Investigations in 1953. One of the first signs of such a thaw was the publication in 1958 of John N. Findlay’s Hegel: A Re-Examination, in which the author described Hegel as having anticipated “many of the views that we now associate with the name of Wittgenstein” (Findlay 1958: 27). The views in question concerned the relation of thought to language, and in particular, to socially grounded and historically variable patterns of language use. Such issues were taken up a little over a decade and a half later by Charles Taylor in his widely read Hegel (Taylor 1975), in which he directed attention 1 Carnap attested to the influence of the Tractatus on his work (Carnap 1963, 25). Concerning the more general influence of the Tractatus on what would become the modern discipline of semantics, see, for example, Lokhorst 1988 and Stokhof 2008. On the limitations of the “semantics” of the earlier work of Frege and Russell see Goldfarb 1979.