But the British Hegelians had the ascendency and they were inspired by some of the most general features of Hegel’s world-view-even if they didn’t always embrace the specific details of Hegel’s philosophy or his dialectical method whereby intellectual advance is to be achieved by overcoming the contradiction of thesis and antithesis to achieve a higher synthesis. During the late nineteenth century, Hegelian idealists had become the dominating force in British philosophy, although it would still be an exaggeration to say that theirs was the only voice to be heard. To most bystanders watching at the end of the nineteenth century, it would hardly have seemed likely that the New Philosophy would turn into analytic philosophy and analytic philosophy become the dominant tradition in the United Kingdom. _ The resurgence and death of Hegelian philosophy? _ What especially captivated the British idealists was Hegel’s belief that separateness is ultimately an illusion. Nonetheless, a key idea from the Hegelian philosophy they were revolting against would continue to pose a challenge to their realist shift. Their New Philosophy was destined to become one of the contributing streams, one of the most significant, that fed into what was to become that great intellectual river system, analytic philosophy. Even though other philosophical traditions endured and indeed others flourished later, their youthful confidence was far from being entirely misplaced. Moore and Russell called their philosophy ‘new’ because they believed its discovery marked a decisive break in history they envisaged their philosophy would sweep away all of its predecessors. SUGGESTED READING The Return of Idealism: Russell vs Hegel By Paul Redding They are entities which, when we perceive them, are given to us immediately or directly, so without relying upon our having any mediating ideas or internal representations of them, hence given to us without any conceptual trappings of our mental making. According to this philosophy, reality consists of a mind independent plurality of separate, independently existing entities. Moore and Bertrand Russell made a remarkable and creative leap forward-their ‘discovery’, they declared, was of the principles underlying what they called their ‘New Philosophy’. In the late 1890s the Cambridge philosophers G.E. Read the series' previous articles The Return of Metaphysics: Hegel vs Kant, The Return of Idealism: Hegel vs Russell, and Derrida and the trouble with metaphysics. This is the fourth installment in our series The Return of Metaphysics, in partnership with the Essentia Foundation. As it turns out, a critique of that position lied at the foundation of Hegel’s thought, a critique that continues to haunt analytic philosophy today, writes Fraser MacBride. According to Russell, we come to know about the world by direct acquaintance with its objects. This metaphysical picture, however, depended on an epistemological one: direct realism. Russell and Moore, on the other hand, thought that science and common sense taught us that reality is made of individual things that can be understood on their own, separately from everything else. For Hegel and his followers, reality only made sense as a whole: to understand anything you needed to understand how it was a manifestation of reality overall. Moore saw their revolt against Hegelian idealism, and their embrace of realism, as ushering in a ‘new philosophy’, what eventually became known as ‘analytic philosophy’.
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