As readers of this blog know, I often comment on reviews that appear in the Notre Dame Philosophical Review. Mostly, I note when the critics have landed a real shiner (like the recent tags by Mendieta and Maudlin). But, this time, I’m a bit perplexed. In his recent review of the text Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems, Frederick Neuhouser opens:
“Rahel Jaeggi’s Entfremdung is one of the most exciting books to have appeared on the German philosophical scene in the last decade. It has two significant strengths that are rarely joined in a single book: it presents a rigorous and enlightening analysis of an important but recently neglected philosophical concept (alienation), and in doing so it illuminates, far better than any purely historical study could do, fundamental ideas of one of the most obscure figures in the history of philosophy (G. W. F. Hegel).”
Huh? Hegel? One of “the most obscure figures in the history of philosophy”? Yeah, I guess so… right after Socrates and Nietzsche.
you’re getting all big in your britches already, just cuz you got your ph.d. some of us troglodytes still think hegel is kind of complicated . . .
not me. but other people. like kyle, for example. or alexi.
ok, i think i get it now. the claim is that Hegel’s *work* is obscure. that, i agre with.
i thought that the claim was that Hegel *the person* was “one of the most obscure figures in the history of philosophy.”
actually, i think you read the intention right, but i read the actual claim right. i think he phrased it ambiguously by putting the noun “figure” in his description, which seems to refer to Hegel and not his work.