Abstract:
The introduction into Anglophone philosophy of Frege's revolutionary logic from around the turn of the 20th century is commonly taken as having permanently severed the emergent 'analytic philosophy' from 
19th century idealism, and from Hegelian idealism in particular. In this paper I want to challenge this commonplace and suggest that a reconvergence between work in analytic philosophy and Hegel's idealism has followed the emergence of the modal metaphysics that accompanied developments in modal logic that started in the 1950s and 60s. More specifically, I argue that many features of a position within the debate over possible worlds - that of Robert Stalnaker's 'modalist, actualist' alternative to David Lewis's 'modal realism' - overlap with major features of Hegel's version of idealism. These parallels allows us to better understand the ontological commitments of Hegel's form of idealism. In particular, they allow us to appreciate the relative ontological modesty of 'absolute idealism'.