Hegel and British idealism
pp. 165-176
in: Lisa Herzog (ed), Hegel's thought in Europe, Berlin, Springer, 2013Abstract
Over thirty years after his death in Germany in a foreign land most famed philosophically for its common sense empiricism and distrust of anything abstract or metaphysical, there occurred one of the most striking and surprising outbreaks to date of Hegelianism. From around 1865 onwards a species of neo-Hegelian idealism rose up rapidly to become the dominant form of philosophy in Britain. This chapter offers an introductory consideration of that school1 — most commonly referred to as "British Idealism" — presenting, first, an outline of the basic history of the movement, second, an inventory of the several different kinds of material it gave rise to and, finally, some broader observations on the general character of this particular incarnation of "Hegelianism".
