The Rational and the Real: An Essay in Metaphysics

A book with so Hegelian a title should, I suppose, be more Hegelian than this one. I share with Hegel the conviction that the rational is the real and the real is the rational. I have learned something from Hegel and borrowed here and there. But the reader should not jump to conclusions. I rather fear that anti-Hegelians will not get past the title and that Hegelians, upon discovering heresy, will give up after the first chapter, but I continue to hope that my fear is quite unjustified. I should, I think, say something about the relation between this book and an earlier work, a University of London Ph. D. thesis, entitled Some Problems in British Idealist Ontology - a Re-examination and Attempted Reconstruction. There, I surveyed some key problems in idealist metaphysics and also endeavoured to discover just how strong a case could be made for the idealist position. I decided that a pretty strong case could be made and I was very nearly convinced by it. The position I have developed here is no longer, strictly speaking, idealist though it is perhaps more nearly idealist than anything else. I have used some ideas developed in the earlier work and some of the chapter titles are the same.