Abstract

Building on two decades of work on Hegel and continental philosophy, John McCumber offers his distinctive take on the current state of the debate about Hegel’s critique of Kant. McCumber seems to agree with a popular picture of Kant as the proponent of a “thin, universalistic, and argumentatively purified style of philosophy” and of Hegel as the original source of the “historically embedded naturalists” whose work is then taken up by feminists, gender, and race theorists. This is a plausible, if ultimately less than persuasive, conception of the contrast between Kant and Hegel; I take Kant’s works to be a refutation of the kind of position that McCumber ascribes to Kant. McCumber interprets...