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Vol 33, No 2 (2023)
Analytical reading of Hegel: a new perspective
1-6
The logic of Hegel’s Logic
Abstract
One of the problems involved in doing the history of philosophy is reinterpreting past philosophers in such a way that the relevance of their work to contemporary discussion can become clear. In doing so one often finds that certain doctrines to which a philosopher himself attached great significance may not be central to a particular line of his argument. Recent efforts at interpreting Kant have attempted, for example, to disentangle the objectionable part of the Kantian metaphysics from the “objective” argument contained therein. The whole doctrine of transcendental psychology in Kant’s first Critique, for example, may perhaps be shelved without injuring the rational core of the argument.
With Hegel, however, the case seems prima facie more difficult, since Hegel’s whole system is seemingly tied down to a very obscure metaphysics, that of the “World Spirit.” However, just as not all of Kant’s doctrine is necessary to his philosophy, perhaps not all of Hegel’s philosophy is inextricably bound up with commitment to such shadowy entities. The author tries to draw out the central argumentative core of Hegel’s Science of Logic. To do this he first sketches briefly what Hegel takes to be the goal of such a theory. Second, he outlines the basic logical structure of the work. The result is a presentation of Hegel’s philosophy that will make it not the obscure confidant of World Spirit, but rather one not far from contemporary concerns.
7-37
Hegel’s Logic as a theory of meaning: material-conceptual and structural aspects
Abstract
The paper analyzes main logical categories in Hegel’s Logic from the standpoint of contemporary formal logic and analytic philosophy of language. Hegel is taken as a radical critical philosopher in Kantian sense, who develops Kantian critical philosophy. Hegel’s Logic is portrayed as metaphysics and semantics, for it provides a profound analysis of logical form of main categories and the logical structure of local speech domains. The author considers subjectivity of judgements, constitution of sortal domains and an inferentialist account of predicates within logical universe of discourse. Speech acts are always singular acts that are performed and articulated by speakers. The content of a judgement is constituted due to the intricate genus-species difference system, which is expressed by the concepts of infinite negation and determinate negation. Some speech acts require knowledge not only of generic properties that are inherent to genus of a subject matter, but also contentful determination of difference of the particular individuals in question. Sense of predicates is determined within an inferential system of sentences and their relations of inference and contradiction. The form of inference is defined solely syntactically or logically, however for any particular case is required contentful knowledge, which is based on pre-knowledge and power of judgement. The system of science is a network of material-conceptual truths taken as synthetic judgements a priori. Hegelian concept of “idea” signifies adequate theoretical and shared practical forms that include the ways of evaluation of generic judgements as correct or true ones, which should serve to our orientation in the world. Hence the idea is essentially the same as the personal form of human life.
39-67
Hegel on Logic as metaphysics
Abstract
Over the past 30 years the question of Hegel’s vision of metaphysics has become widely debated. Especially important is the issue: what does Hegel mean when he says, not that metaphysics requires an unusual, speculative logic for its exposition, but “coincides with logic.” The aim of this chapter is to offer an interpretation of this claim, with special attention to Hegel’s understanding of Kant’s transcendental logic, which Hegel both highly praises and sharply criticizes, and to his equally important attention to Aristotle, the originator of the view that logic itself has metaphysical implications. Hegel is a post-Kantian philosopher and he should not be considered as a fallback into the old metaphysics, which understood thoughts as essentialities of things (as in Scholastic philosophy or early modern rationalism). Hegel’s project in the Logic is the completion of the enterprise initiated by the founding assumption of Ancient metaphysics: that to be is to be intelligible. Accordingly the task of metaphysics is not to say of things what they are, but to say of anything at all what it must be, such that the question “what is it” can be raised.
69-101
Making sense of Hegel’s dialectic: what kind of method is it?
Abstract
The paper presents an interpretation of a central Hegelian concept “dialectic” reading him as a post-Kantian critical thinker. We can speak of objective dialectic as processes in the world and subjective dialectic conceived of as a method. I shortly discuss the correctness of the approach to dialectic as a special kind of logic and relation of dialectic to formal logic. (Subjective) dialectic is interpreted as a method of inquiry that is closely related to contemporary projects of abductive and interrogative logic. Such method reflects on our theoretical practices and formulates strategic rules that guide inquiry and aim at enhancing its productivity.
Further, the three familiar moments of dialectics are scrutinized and interpreted from “analytic” point of view. The abstract moment refers thematically to the object language (in different domains) that has no awareness of its own implicit presuppositions. It is a rigid and hence finite form of thinking. The negative-reasonable moment signifies the process of thinking coming into “motion” and is marked by noticing and reflecting on the presuppositions of the object speech. It tries to establish the connection between different domains and apprehend and bring the previously concealed presuppositions into a consistent system. This is a questioning of the concealed premises, which implies a resolution of conundrums emerged and a connection of it into a whole unified system of differentiated and articulated content with awareness of presuppositions. This allows to accomplish both semantic and conceptual progress as an increase of distinctions and nuances in our thinking. The resolution of the second negative moment is labeled as the positive-reasonable or speculative moment. It contains the results and contents of previous moments and also implies that the method itself and its actor comes to the fore. That actor is the collective epistemic agent in its different forms, Hegel calls it the Concept. Thus, dialectic is a reflective pragmatic approach or method of inquiry, which strives to be developed into a dynamic or genetic theory of categories.
103-141
Domesticating absolute idealism
Abstract
The article offers a general overview of how John McDowell tries to “domesticate” Hegelian philosophy by fitting it into the context of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. One of the ways of such “domestication” (or even appropriation) of Hegel’s philosophy is to bring the “identity thesis” (identity of the of the subject and object of thought) into line with the philosophical quietism of Ludwig Wittgenstein. According to McDowell, absolute idealism is quite compatible with the realism of common sense, which Wittgenstein proposed to focus on in our reflections on philosophical problems. Moreover, in McDowell’s eyes, Hegel’s philosophy has the same “therapeutic” potential as “reminders” from the Philosophical Investigations. In other words, the goal of Hegelian philosophy may also not be to find a solution to philosophical problems (primarily in the field of ontology and epistemology), but to get rid of them, provided that their conceptual source is discovered. Therefore, the “identity thesis” in Hegel’s philosophy does not mean that the world is a projection of the subjective abilities of the mind (whether individual or collective). On the contrary, it means the denial of the ontological gap between the mind and objective reality. One of the main sources of the idea of this gap, as well as many other problems of modern philosophy, McDowell considers the reduction of nature to the sphere of causal laws. In the light of this approach, it remains unexplained how external reality not only causally, but also rationally affects us. Inspired by the philosophy of Hegel, McDowell shows how the recognition of primarily a conceptual structure of external reality guarantees us not only its knowability (subjective idealism would also guarantee this), but also the objectivity of this cognition.
143-165
Georg Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Abstract
In his retrospective review of The Phenomenology of Spirit Robert Brandom tries to re-actualize Hegel’s ideas, linking his speculative dialectics to the twentieth-century linguistic philosophy and pragmatism. The German philosopher, Brandom argues, definitely concurs with the Wittgensteinian tradition in emphasizing social practices (“uses, customs, institutions”) as providing the framework for our understanding of normatively significant contents. But where Wittgenstein is suspicious in principle of philosophical theorizing, Hegel is an ambitious metaphysical system-builder. Coeval with modal realism, Hegel’s “idealism” claims that not only our linguistic practices and subjectively entertained thoughts, but objective states of affairs as well are conceptually articulated (as John McDowell put it, “the conceptual has no outer boundary”).
The “normative statuses” (Hegel’s “being-in-itself” translated into Brandom’s slang) are instituted by reciprocal recognition of individual subjects participating in a collective “game of giving and asking for reasons.” Recognition — that is what is required for what Hegel calls “actual self-consciousness:” to be what one takes oneself to be. Traditional (pre-modern) society understood normative statuses as objective, written into the non-, pre-, or super-human world as it objectively is independently of any subjective attitudes (“being-for-itself”). Brandom’s Hegel condemns this view as essentialist. Norms are made, not found; they are products of our recognitive practices. Still the collapse of the traditional order generates “alienation” (Entfremdung) by which Brandom means a characteristically modern process of relativization of the human’s moral and political consciousness. What is needed, he thinks (with Hegel), is some way of reconciling what the ancients knew, that our normative attitudes are responsible to our actual normative statuses, with what the moderns learned, that statuses are nothing apart from the attitudes. He accordingly envisages the next stage of human history in which this lesson is explicitly embraced, and the stance of modernity is reconciled with Sittlichkeit, so that alienation of the modern (individual) consciousness is overcome. This post-modern form of self-consciousness Hegel calls “Absolute Knowing.”
167-177
Distinguish between good and evil. The opposition between Schelling and Hegel as the axis of the modern ethical field
Abstract
The article focuses on the problem of distinguishing between good and evil, which has become more acute since the twentieth century. The study of the theoretical evolution of this problem discovers the approach found by G. W. F. Hegel, which was not used in modern attempts to develop it. After exposing the current state of the problem, the author shows the impossibility of finding a way out of it, remaining within the Kantian formulation of it, which continues to dominate today. This motivates the appeal to approaches that critically overcome Kantianism, primarily the approaches of Schelling and Hegel.
F. W. J. Schelling connects the reality of evil with the freedom of human, which potentially coincides with the divine. This gives rise to conflict, since only God can occupy the central place of actual universality, while the creature must renounce itself, being integrated as a part into the deity. In this confrontation, Schelling sees only two possibilities: to subdue or to submit. Therefore, the conquering strategy of the uncreated self turns out to be good, while the evil is the same strategy of the created self, not backed by power and therefore doomed to lose. Then evil becomes indistinguishable from good.
To this strategy which in Hegel becomes the evil, Hegel opposes a new opportunity: to leave the central place empty, which means renunciation of domination, but not of self, as for God, who through this becomes the spirit (of the community), so for every individual, who becomes free, not subjugating, but recognizing the freedom and self of the other. In conclusion, the Hegelian find is tested for relevance to the current situation.
179-199
Relativist, pluralist, syncretist… An non-trivial portrait of the philosopher
Abstract
In her book, Oksana Tselishcheva traces the evolution of Richard Rorty’s views “from sharp criticism to recognition” of the analytic philosophy in its dialogue-confrontation with the continental tradition. Casted himself as a kind of disciplinary provocateur in the Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty, according to Tselishcheva, mitigated his criticism by the 90s and took a stance of a peculiar “philosophical ecumenism.” This author’s conclusion, however, is not supported by thorough arguments and evidences. Rorty’s writings of the 1990s and 2000s do not allow us to suggest that his attitude towards analytic philosophy has been changing noticeably over time. The American pragmatist criticized analytic philosophers for their theoretical narrowness, underestimation of the history of philosophy, and isolationism. The linguistic turn, according to Rorty, was useful only insofar as it “turned philosophers’ attention from the topic of experience toward that of linguistic behavior,” allowing them to “break the hold of empiricism.” In the current trends and tendencies of the analytic philosophy Rorty traced symptoms of the “ontotheological” tradition’s decline.
The monoideistic philosopher, who for 35 years of his life adhered to one essentially unchanged position (anti-representationalism, historicism, criticism of the empiricist dogmas), Rorty is portrayed by Tselishcheva as constantly self-doubting thinker, oscillating between “paradigms” and academic divisions, and deeply concerned with the problem of self-identification. Further, the author confines herself almost exclusively to metaphilosophical reflections (regarding the particularities of philosophy as an academic discipline and the ongoing quarrel between the faculties, communities and schools), as well as discussion of Rorty’s relationship with colleagues — analytical and continental philosophers. The most interesting in Rorty (his sui generis deflationism, reinterpretation of Hegel’s, Freud’s and Dewey’s thought etc.) remains behind the scenes. The history of philosophy here is actually replaced by the sociology and psychology of knowledge. For the sake of an adequate understanding of Rorty’s ideas, it doesn’t do much.
201-219
Gleb Pavlovsky’s paradoxical westernism
221-234
Gefter and the historical: in memory of Pavlovsky
235-243