“After Hegel, philosophy confronts the possibility of its own death, and in some sense has to do so if it is to remain the most fundamental kind of thinking.”

— David Wood

Source: Philosophy At The Limit (1990), Chapter 4, Philosophy As Writing: The Case Of Hegel, p. 88

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David Wood 17

British philosopher, born 1946 1946

Bryan Magee (1930–2019) British politician

Source: Confessions of a Philosopher (1997), p. 157
Context: As Voltaire once remarked, "It is the privilege of the real genius, especially one who opens up a new path, to make great mistakes with impunity." The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy. For that reason there has been, ever since, a watershed in understanding between those who have taken his work on board and those who have not. For a good many of the problems he uncovered, the solutions he put forward have not stood the test of time, but his uncovering of the problems remains the most illuminating thing a philosopher has ever done. Because of the fundamental character of these problems, and because Kant did not solve them, confronting them has been the most important challenge to philosophy ever since.

“Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel’s dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life.”

Donald Phillip Verene (1937) philosopher

Source: Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (1997), p. 191

“After all, in the poets love has its priests, and sometimes one hears a voice which knows how to defend it; but of faith one hears never a word. Who speaks in honor of this passion? Philosophy goes further. Theology sits rouged at the window and courts its favor, offering to sell her charms to philosophy. it is supposed to be difficult to understand Hegel, but to understand Abraham is a trifle. To go beyond Hegel's is a miracle, but to get beyond Abraham is the easiest thing of all.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Problemata: Preliminary Expectoration
1840s, Fear and Trembling (1843)

“The controversy as to whether socialism is possible has been settled by the fact that it exists, and it is a fundamental axiom of my philosophy, at any rate, that anything that exists, is possible.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1957) Segments of the economy, 1956, a symposium: the Fifth Economics-in-Action Program sponsored jointly by Republic Steel Corporation and Case Institute of Technology
1950s

“Nothing is more characteristic of the Hegelian system of knowledge than the fact that upon its highest pinnacle, where it becomes knowledge of knowledge, i. e. knowledge knowing of itself, it is impossible for it to have any other content but simply the history of philosophy, the account of its continuing self-exposition, in which all individual developments, coming full circle, can only be stages along the road to the absolute philosophy reached in Hegel himself. But that which knowledge is explicitly upon this topmost pinnacle as the history of philosophy, the philosophy completed in Hegel, it is implicitly all along the line: the knowledge of history and the history of knowledge, the history of truth, the history of God, as Hegel was able to say: the philosophy of History. History here has entered so thoroughly into reason, philosophy has so basically become the philosophy of history, that reason, the object of philosophy itself, has become history utterly and completely, that reason cannot understand itself other than a sits own history, and that, from the opposite point of view, it is in a position to recognize itself at once in all history in some stage of its life-process, and also in its entirety, so far as the study permits us to divine the whole. It is a matter of the production of self-movement of the thought-content in the consciousness of the thinking subject. It is not a matter of reproduction! The Hegelian way of looking is the looking of a spectator only in so far as it is in fact in principle and exclusively theory, thinking consciousness. Granting this premise, and setting aside Kierkegaard’s objection that with it the spectator might by chance have forgotten himself, that is the practical reality of his existence, then for Hegel it is also in order (only too much in order!) that the human subject, whilst looking in this manner, stands by no means apart as if it were not concerned. It is in this looking that the something seen is produced. And the thing seen actually has its reality in the fact that it is produced as the thing seen in the looking of the human subject. Man cannot participate more energetically (within the frame-work of theoretical possibility), he cannot be more forcefully transferred from the floor of the theatre on to the stage than in his theory.”

Karl Barth (1886–1968) Swiss Protestant theologian

Karl Barth Protestant Thought From Rousseau to Ritschl, 1952, 1959 p. 284-285
Protestant Thought From Rousseau to Ritschl 1952, 1956

“Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel, and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

Spectacles & Predicaments (1979)

“When he said he was going to stop the march and called it a hate march, I think that was very provocative. The Mayor's statements have created a climate that could possibly lead to some kind of confrontation.”

Al Sharpton (1954) American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and television/radio talk show host

News conference (18 August 1999), prior to the second Million Youth March[citation needed]

“It ought to be possible to restore to the word "philosophy" its original meaning: philosophy − the "love of wisdom" − is the science of all the fundamental principles; this science operates with intuition, which "perceives," and not with reason alone, which "concludes."”

Frithjof Schuon book The Transfiguration of Man

Subjectively speaking, the essence of philosophy is certitude; for the moderns, on the contrary, the essence of philosophy is doubt: the philosopher is supposed to reason without any premise (voraussetzungsloses Denken), as if this condition were not itself a preconceived idea; this is the classical contradiction of all relativism. Everything is doubted except for doubt. The solution to the problem of knowledge − if there is a problem − could not possibly be this intellectual suicide that is the promotion of doubt; on the contrary, it lies in having recourse to a source of certitude that transcends the mental mechanism, and this source − the only one there is − is the pure Intellect, or Intelligence as such.
[2005, The Transfiguration of Man, World Wisdom, 3, 978-0-94153219-8]
Miscellaneous, Philosophy

“Until socialism—like Nazism or fascism confronted by the death camps and the slaughter of innocents—is confronted with its lived reality, the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life, we will not live "after socialism."”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

“Religion has always, I think, implied a belief in some fundamental harmony, some sort of reconciliation between the claims of our own nature and the facts of the universe.”

J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925) British philosopher

Some Dogmas of Religion (1906), p. 9.

“After Hegel, philosophy confronts the possibility of its own death, and in some sense has to do so if it is to remain the most fundamental kind of thinking.”

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David Wood 17

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