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Hegel’S Pragmatism, Willem A. Devries

Faculty Publications

This chapter examines Hegel’s complex relation to pragmatism. After a short review of the extant literature on their relation, deVries focuses on their shared rejection of the Cartesian tradition, which assumes that minds are immaterial, self-contained substances that are (1) transparent to themselves, (2) known directly or immediately to themselves, (3) prior to and independently of any knowledge of any other created substance, e.g., the external world. Hegel and the pragmatists rejected this view for at least three reasons. (1) The Cartesians employ an impoverished conception of experience that does not do justice to the complex interplay of the sensory …