I feel a little guilty in recommending Hegel because this is quite different from the Kant-Friesian School which started with Leonard Nelson. Still I feel the total dismissal of Hegel is not warranted.
The problem is that while Hegel to me seems very great, a lot of misuse still is made of him. Now Popper thought that he was the cause of all totalitarian movements that came later, but that does not seem accurate at all. Never the less nowadays self identified Hegelians do seem to have gone off into the deep end of the swimming pool.
[You might look at the debate between Dr Kelley Ross and a self identified Hegelian on his web site and you will see what I mean. The weak part of Hegel in fact seems to be when people try to apply his ideas to politics.]
So far I like to look at German Idealism as one. That is one solid body of knowledge. The differences I like to think are only the result of looking at different aspects of the same thing. So I tend to see Hegel, McTaggart as not all that different from Leonard Nelson. Just different aspects.
[Anyway just take McTaggart's critique of Hegel --in particular his "take" on dialectics and you do not end up much different than Leonard Nelson. That is his idea that dialectics corrects mistakes.]
[ I have tried to ignore one German idealist after the other. It does not seem to .work. You can try to take Hegel in a vacuum and that does not work. Try to take Kant in a vacuum and that works even worse. Try to ignore them all and that goes down blind alleys. I think you really in the end have to accept Kant Hegel and Leonard Nelson.
If you try to go with the basic Rambam approach in the Guide you end up immediately in the Middle Ages. The Logic works but the axioms do not. That is the problem with all Medieval Philosophy.The Logic is always rock solid but the axioms seem clearly false. Try to go with later Rationalists or Empiricist the logic is mostly circular and the axioms are false. So to avoid Kant and Hegel which is what a lot of people would like to do just does not work. --Unless you like twentieth century philosophy which is sheer gibberish.]
Looking at for one example the real is rational in terms of time and Bradley and McTaggart's dealing with it leads me to notice the same thing that Dr Kelly Ross does, and Job also--the universe now is not perfect. Whether it is with Hegel or Dr. Ross I get the same idea that perfection is only in the Platonic spheres, not down here.
[McTaggart's concept of time is also just not all that different from Kant but from different reasons., i.e. there is no time. However here too it seems necessary to divide reality into two parts, the dinge an sich and phenomena as Kant does.
In terms of Quantum Mechanics this idea of the problem with time come up in so far that thing are superpositions of many possible values in space and time before they are actually measured.
But that doe not mean there is no time.Rather things do not have any one value in space or time until measured. This you know from the fact that Nature violates Bell's inequality. [Bell did not like QM and base on the Einstein [EPR] set up he showed that any hidden variable theory would come out differently that QM. Nature shows QM is right. [Bell used the EPR set up to build his inequality. ]
However I have to add that the moon is there even before you see it because of coherence lifetime. That is the atoms are not in a vacuum. They interact with each other and that causes the wave function to collapse to just one state. Coherence lifetime is the reason quantum computing is hard --it is hard to get atoms all by themselves.
The problem is that while Hegel to me seems very great, a lot of misuse still is made of him. Now Popper thought that he was the cause of all totalitarian movements that came later, but that does not seem accurate at all. Never the less nowadays self identified Hegelians do seem to have gone off into the deep end of the swimming pool.
[You might look at the debate between Dr Kelley Ross and a self identified Hegelian on his web site and you will see what I mean. The weak part of Hegel in fact seems to be when people try to apply his ideas to politics.]
So far I like to look at German Idealism as one. That is one solid body of knowledge. The differences I like to think are only the result of looking at different aspects of the same thing. So I tend to see Hegel, McTaggart as not all that different from Leonard Nelson. Just different aspects.
[Anyway just take McTaggart's critique of Hegel --in particular his "take" on dialectics and you do not end up much different than Leonard Nelson. That is his idea that dialectics corrects mistakes.]
[ I have tried to ignore one German idealist after the other. It does not seem to .work. You can try to take Hegel in a vacuum and that does not work. Try to take Kant in a vacuum and that works even worse. Try to ignore them all and that goes down blind alleys. I think you really in the end have to accept Kant Hegel and Leonard Nelson.
If you try to go with the basic Rambam approach in the Guide you end up immediately in the Middle Ages. The Logic works but the axioms do not. That is the problem with all Medieval Philosophy.The Logic is always rock solid but the axioms seem clearly false. Try to go with later Rationalists or Empiricist the logic is mostly circular and the axioms are false. So to avoid Kant and Hegel which is what a lot of people would like to do just does not work. --Unless you like twentieth century philosophy which is sheer gibberish.]
Looking at for one example the real is rational in terms of time and Bradley and McTaggart's dealing with it leads me to notice the same thing that Dr Kelly Ross does, and Job also--the universe now is not perfect. Whether it is with Hegel or Dr. Ross I get the same idea that perfection is only in the Platonic spheres, not down here.
[McTaggart's concept of time is also just not all that different from Kant but from different reasons., i.e. there is no time. However here too it seems necessary to divide reality into two parts, the dinge an sich and phenomena as Kant does.
In terms of Quantum Mechanics this idea of the problem with time come up in so far that thing are superpositions of many possible values in space and time before they are actually measured.
But that doe not mean there is no time.Rather things do not have any one value in space or time until measured. This you know from the fact that Nature violates Bell's inequality. [Bell did not like QM and base on the Einstein [EPR] set up he showed that any hidden variable theory would come out differently that QM. Nature shows QM is right. [Bell used the EPR set up to build his inequality. ]
However I have to add that the moon is there even before you see it because of coherence lifetime. That is the atoms are not in a vacuum. They interact with each other and that causes the wave function to collapse to just one state. Coherence lifetime is the reason quantum computing is hard --it is hard to get atoms all by themselves.
