In this paper, I consider critically recent attempts by John McDowell, Sebastian Rödl, and Irad Kimhi to rehabilitate, within contemporary analytic philosophy, a project of absolute idealism reminiscent of that associated with Hegel in his overcoming of Kant.  Characteristically, these attempts commit themselves to vindicating the identity of thinking and being in two ways: first, by upholding the suggestion that what there is to be thought has the same ontological form as that which is, or can be, the case; and second, by portraying the common predicative unity characteristic of this form as having the essential structure of the rational capacities of a subject or agent as evidenced primarily in her activity of judgment. I consider the logical form of consistent unity that this requires of the relevant capacities, and argue that this unity cannot survive, once the relevant rational capacities are seen (as, surely, they must be) as linguistic ones: capacities, that is, that must be maintained and exercised within the life of finitely constituted learners and speakers of language.  Once the relevant rational capacities are seen as linguistic ones in this sense, the identity of thinking and being required by the recent defenses of idealism is shown to be chimeric; while at the same time, formal considerations about the application of the relevant capacities in actual cases of linguistic predication appear to point, rather, to a formally indicative and structurally necessary mutual incommensurability of the two.

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