Is there a Deduction in Hegel's Science of Logic?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Charlie Cooper-Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
The Absolute

Abstract Robert Pippin's recent study of Hegel's Logic, Hegel's Realm of Shadows, argues that we should read Hegel as rejecting the need for a Transcendental Deduction in logic because he takes Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, to have ruled out the scepticism that motivates Kant's Deduction. By contrast, I argue, we cannot understand what Pippin calls the ‘identity’ of logic and metaphysics in the Science of Logic unless we see how Hegel does provide a kind of Deduction argument in the Logic, albeit one stripped of the psychologism present in the Kantian version. Accordingly, I provide a sketch of what such an ‘absolute’ Deduction must look like, and argue that Hegel's presentation of the ‘absolute idea’ functions as the conclusion of such an argument.

God and Nature in Hegel's Logic

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 65-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cinzia Ferrini
Keyword(s):  
Self Determination ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Relationship

The aim of this essay is to cast light on the puzzling transition from logic to nature that is stated at the end of Hegel's Science of Logic. The passage is summed up by the famous intriguing sentence about the absolute idea freely resolving to let itself go.Firstly, I shall sketch the, so to speak, “divine” features of the absolute philosophical knowing that is to be developed in the Encyclopaedia system. My point is to account for the relationship between the standpoint reached by the Phenomenology of Spirit and the content of the Logic, regarded as the presentation of God as he is in his eternal essence.Secondly, I shall focus attention on the way in which the developed idea of philosophical knowing is systematically displayed in the Encyclopaedia. My point is now to account for: i) the mutual relationships among the three parts of philosophical science (science of logic, philosophy of nature, philosophy of spirit); and ii) the relationship between these parts and the whole of philosophy.Thirdly, I shall examine the two main and opposite standard interpretations of the transition from the first to the second part of the Encyclopaedia. My point here is to challenge the conceptual presuppositions of the readings under consideration, by means of a close examination of the revised editions of Hegel's text.Fourthly, I shall argue for a different view. My last point is to focus on the character of the absolute idea's self-determination. It involves letting the determination of the distinction exist as something independent, so that the “other” obtains the determinacy of “other-being”, of an actual entity. Therefore it must be distanced from the divine way of generating (the Father-Son relationship) that is the form of love. I shall conclude by discussing the implications of Hegel's use of the notion of “creation” and his paradoxical definition of nature as being the Son and not the Son of God.

From Actuality to Concept in Hegel’s Logic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Ng
Keyword(s):  
Reciprocal Relation ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
The Absolute

This chapter examines Hegel’s treatment of the concept of actuality in his Science of Logic. It argues that Hegel’s treatment of actuality serves two functions: first, it provides the argument for the ‘genesis of the Concept’, Hegel’s version of Kant’s transcendental deduction; second, it allows Hegel to determine a specific type of activity characteristic of both life and freedom. The key to understanding the transition from actuality to the Concept (der Begriff) lies in Hegel’s concept of reciprocity (Wechselwirkung), a reciprocal relation between cause and effect that constitutes an inner purposiveness of form. The author develops this argument by examining the key moves of the three chapters that close out the Objective Logic—“The Absolute,” “Actuality,” and “The Absolute Relation”—taking up Hegel’s relation to Aristotle and Spinoza, his treatment of the modal categories, and his critique of mechanistic accounts of causality.

scholarly journals «Ein Spielen der Liebe mit sich selbst». Hegel e la teoria spinoziana dell’amor Dei intellectualis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvatore Carannante
Keyword(s):  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
Philosophical Account ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Different Levels

Resumen: Nella parte quinta dell’Etica, Spinoza descrive l’«amore intellettuale verso Dio» - che nasce nella mente che ha raggiunto la scientia intuitiva - come una «parte dell’amore infinito con il quale Dio ama se stesso». Scopo del saggio è gettare luce sui rilevanti, ma scarsamente considerati, riferimenti di Hegel alla teoria dell’amor dei intellectualis, tentando di ricostruirne il significato a due livelli differenti: anzitutto, esaminando le Lezioni sulla storia della filosofia, dove la descrizione dell’amore intellettuale è inserito in una disamina storico-filosofica del pensiero spinoziano; in secondo luogo, analizzando alcuni passaggi della Fenomenologia dello spirito e della Scienza della logica, opere in cui Hegel richiama l’amor dei intellectualis per esprimere metaforicamente la convinzione che l’Assoluto va concepito in termini dialettici, come soggetto e spirito.  Palabras clave: Hegel - Spinoza - Amor dei intellectualisAbstract: In the fifth part of the Ethica Spinoza describes the «intellectual love toward God» – arising in the mind that has achieved the scientia intuitiva – as a «part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself». The aim of the essay is to cast light, at two different levels, on the interesting but rarely studied Hegel’s references to the theory of amor dei intellectualis: firstly, focusing on the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, where the description of intellectual love is included in an historico-philosophical account of Spinoza’s thought; secondly, dealing with the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the Science of Logic, works in which Hegel mentions the amor dei intellectualis in order to express the idea that the Absolute has to be conceived in dialectical terms, as subject and spirit.Key words: Hegel - Spinoza - Amor dei intellectualis

Hegel's Attempt to Forge a Logic for Spirit

Dialogue ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-672 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth L. Schmitz
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Nature ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Mount Parnassus ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Do So

If Hegel's philosophy were to be characterized by a phrase, it might be “The Dialectical System of Absolute Spirit.” The phrase would seem formidable to some but merely pretentious to others. There are recent signs of an exhumation of the systematic features of Hegel's philosophy in the English-speaking world, and it is to be hoped that the durable clichés of an earlier English period will not prevent a fresh look at Hegel's philosophy. There is, of course, no denying his systematic ambitions, nor any wish on my part to do so. It is just these that I find fascinating. He sought to bring within a comprehensive intellectual order the whole of reality—and a little more besides, say his detractors. In the Phenomenology of Spirit by a turbulent dialectic he scrabblesup to the top of Mount Parnassus in order to clutch the petticoats of the Absolute. In the Science of Logic and in the first part of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences he lays out the logical paradigm of intellectual necessities which are subsequently exhibited in the philosophy of nature and of concrete spirit.

The Idea of ‘Method’ in Hegel's Science of Logic — a Method for Finite Thinking and Absolute Reason

1999 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelica Nuzzo
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Absolute

Hegel's Science of Logic achieves its conclusion with a chapter on the ‘absolute Idea’ that parallels the ending of other works such as the ‘absolute Knowing’ chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the ‘absolute Spirit’ chapter of the Encyclopedia. However, the ending of the Logic claims special systematic attention due to the fact that Hegel presents here the ‘discourse on method’ of his philosophy. The method of philosophy — of philosophical thinking and philosophical knowing — is the method of speculative logic. This logic “takes the place” of the old metaphysics — of the traditional metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis — going beyond Kant's own critique and proposing a new science that establishes itself as the “eigentliche Metaphysik”. The project of concluding this new speculative metaphysics with a theory of method is complicated by the double systematic placing that Hegel attributes to his logic which, at the same time, figures as the very first and very last science of the whole system of philosophy. In this perspective, the absolute Idea of the Logic gains its double relation to the phenomenological ‘absolute knowing’ and to the highest moment of ‘absolute spirit’.

scholarly journals Hegelian Phenomenology of Spirit and Boxing Fight

2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-54
Author(s):  
Jerzy Kosiewicz
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Human Individual ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Low Culture ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Absolute Synthesis

Abstract In the presented text the author points out to anthropological as well as axiological foundations of the boxing fight from the viewpoint of Hegel’s philosophy. In the genial idealist’s views it is possible to perceive the appreciation of the body, which constitutes a necessary basis for the man’s physical activity, for his work oriented towards the self-transformation and the transformation of the external world, as well as for rivalry and the hand-to-hand fight. While focusing our attention on the issue of rivalry and on the situation of the fight - and regarding it from the viewpoint of the master - slave theory (included in the phenomenology of spirit), it is possible to proclaim that even a conventionalised boxing fight - that is, restricted by cultural and sports rules of the game - has features of the fight to the death between two Hegelian forms of selfknowledge striving for self-affirmation and self-realisation. In the boxing fight, similarly as in the above mentioned Hegelian theory, a problem of work and of the development of the human individual (that is, of the subject, self-knowledge, the participant of the fight) appears. There appears also a prospect of death as a possible end of merciless rivalry. The fight revalues the human way in an important way, whereas the prospect for death, the awareness of its proximity, the feeling that its close and possible, saturates the life with additional values. It places the boxer, just like every subject fighting in a similar or a different way, on the path towards absolute abstraction - that is, it brings him closer to his self-fulfilment in the Absolute, to the absolute synthesis. The Hegelian viewpoint enables also to appreciate the boxing fight as a manifestation of low culture (being in contrast with high culture), to turn attention to the relations which - according to Hegel - take place between the Absolute and the man, as well as to show which place is occupied by the subject both in the process of the Absolute’s self-realisation and in the German thinker’s philosophical system. Independently of the dialectical, simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic overtone of considerations connected with the very boxing fight (regarding destruction and spiritualisation on a higher level), it is possible to perceive farreaching appreciation of the human individual in Hegel’s philosophy since the Absolute cannot make its own self-affirmation without the individual, without the human body, without the fight aimed at the destruction of the enemy and without the subjective consciousness and the collective consciousness which appear thanks to this fight. Thus, it is justified to suppose that the foundation of the whole Hegel’s philosophy is constituted by anthropology and that in the framework of this anthropology a special role is played by the fight and by work, which changes the subject and his(her) environment. Admittedly Hegel does not emphasise it explicitly, nevertheless his views (with their centre, which, according to Hegel himself and his interpreters, is constituted by the Absolute) have, as a matter of fact, an anthropocentric character and the main source of the subject’s development is the struggle which, irrespectively of its result, always primarily leads to the destruction or even to the death of one of the sides, just like in the boxing fight. However, it is also a germ of the positive re-orientation of the subject, the beginning and a continuation of that what the phenomenology of the spirit describes as a movement towards absolute abstraction.

Hegel's Hyperbolic Formalism

2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (01) ◽  
pp. 107-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rocío Zambrana
Keyword(s):  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
Transcendental Logic ◽  
Great Insight ◽  
The Absolute

The Science of Logic is perhaps Hegel's most notoriously impenetrable work. Despite well over a century of commentaries as well as the recent proliferation of scholarship, there exists little agreement concerning the text, whether with regard to particular details or the project of speculative logic in general. Nonetheless, the Logic has often been regarded as exemplifying totalizing metaphysics at its worst. Contemporary philosophers concerned with overcoming metaphysics have thus sought to show not only the incoherence of speculative logic but also the perils of Hegel's supposedly totalizing philosophy. In contrast, showing the continuity between Kant and Hegel has been the strategy for establishing a ‘non-metaphysical’ view of Hegel's speculative logic. Against readings of Hegel as a metaphysical monist who defends the reality of the Absolute Idea developing in nature and spirit, speculative logic is presented as the absolute-idealist successor to Kantian transcendental logic. Hegel's speculative logic is an ‘idealist logic’, since it aims at expounding the conditions necessary for the determinacy of any possible object of thought. Speculative logic thus clarities that experience is dependent on non-empirical concepts and, ultimately, on selfconsciousness. Along this interpretative line, Hegel's Science of Logic offers an account of thinking as a norm-based activity, and of concepts as rules for fixing determinacy. The great insight of Hegel's Logic is, on this view, twofold. First, Hegel's notion of the concept [der Begriff] is understood as a holistic-inferential system of logical concepts, since it provides an account of conceptual content as determined by every other possible content. Second, Hegel's analysis of the actualization of the concept — of the concept that has ‘made itself the foundation’, in Hegel's obscure phrasing — provides an account of the fundamental role of authority involved in the process of fixing determinacy. To be bound to a rule is to acknowledge it as having authority over us and at the same time to institute it as authoritative over the states of affairs that we seek to determine. That Hegel spoke of the freedom of the concept is, therefore, crucial. It suggests that determinacy is ultimately a matter of the authorization of reason, of establishing one way of fixing intelligibility over against others.

Absolute Knowledge and the Ethical Conclusion of the Phenomenology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Moyar
Keyword(s):  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
Absolute Knowledge

Hegel wrote in The Science of Logic that the deduction of the concept of science was accomplished at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit in ‘Absolute Knowledge.’ This chapter links the deduction claim to the metaphor of a ladder to science that Hegel discusses in the Phenomenology Preface, and to the sublation of the form of objectivity that is the focus of ‘Absolute Knowledge.’ It argues that this reconciliation of self-consciousness with objectivity coincides with the task of unifying the theoretical and practical domains. Once one appreciates that Hegel’s goal is such a unification, one can see why he holds that the agent of conscience is already quite close to possessing absolute knowledge. The agent’s knowledge in deliberation, together with the agent’s relation to other agents in the process of recognizing action on conscience, has the same conceptual form as the complete theoretical object, the expanded version of the Concept, or inferential objectivity.

Hegel’s Speculative Identity Thesis

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-122
Author(s):  
Karen Ng
Keyword(s):  
Three Dimensional ◽  
The Self ◽  
Transcendental Argument ◽  
Philosophical Method ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
Early Presentation ◽  
Identity Thesis ◽  
Refutation Of Idealism ◽  
Dimensional Argument

This chapter explores Hegel’s speculative identity thesis, defending the importance of Schelling for Hegel’s appropriation of Kant’s purposiveness theme. It provides an interpretation of Hegel’s first published text, the Differenzschrift, and analyzes the relation between “subjective subject-objects” and “objective subject-objects” as an early presentation of Hegel’s philosophical method. In addition to defending the contribution of Schelling, this chapter provides an interpretation of Fichte’s contribution via his notion of the self-positing activity of the I. It then turns to a reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, demonstrating that the notion of “negativity” can be understood along the lines of speculative identity. The chapter argues that Hegel presents life as constitutive for self-consciousness by way of a three-dimensional argument: the employment of an analogy; a transcendental argument; and a refutation of idealism argument. It concludes by briefly outlining how the speculative identity thesis is carried forward in the Science of Logic.

The Oxford Handbook of Hegel

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
The Past ◽  
Philosophical Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Systematic Importance

The Oxford Handbook of Hegel is a comprehensive guide to the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, the last major thinker in the philosophical movement known as German Idealism. Beginning with chapters on his first published writings, the authors draw out Hegel’s debts to his predecessors and highlight the themes and arguments that have proven the most influential over the past two centuries. There are six chapters each on the Phenomenology of Spirit and The Science of Logic, and in-depth analyses of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. Five chapters cover Hegel’s philosophy of law, action, and the ethical and political philosophy presented in his Philosophy of Right. Several chapters cover the many recently edited lecture series from the 1820s, bringing new clarity to Hegel’s conception of aesthetics, the philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy. The concluding part focuses on Hegel’s legacy, from his role in the formation of Marx’s philosophy to his importance for contemporary liberal political philosophy. The Handbook includes many essays from younger scholars who have brought new perspectives and rigor to the study of Hegel’s thought. The essays are marked by close engagement with Hegel’s difficult texts and by a concern with highlighting the ongoing systematic importance of Hegel’s philosophy.

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