G. W. F. Hegel - The Science of Logic

GEORGE DI GIOVANNI is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University, Montreal. His previous publications include Freedom and Religion in Kant and his Immediate Successors: The Vocation of Humankind , 17741800 (Cambridge, 2005), Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism (2000), and The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant , Vol VI: Religion and Rational Theology (Cambridge, 1996).

Translated and edited by

George di Giovanni

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

George di Giovanni 2010

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published in print format 2010

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

George Di Giovanni

Writing an introduction to a translation of Hegel's Logic is an even more formidable task than the translation itself. There are serious issues that immediately confront the author, and it will not be amiss to indicate them at the start, and also to declare how I have chosen to settle them. First, there is the issue of defining the task that an introduction should perform. An introduction cannot be a step-by-step guide for the neophyte across the intricacies of the Logic. Fortunately, it need not be. There are already guides of this kind available, some classic, others more recent, all good in their different ways. An introduction may be a general statement about the project of the Logic, its place in Hegel's System, and the key concepts that govern the progression of the categories. But general statements of this kind, while of no use to those already in the know, do little in the way of indicating why the Logic is at least an interesting, and as I believe also still significant, philosophical product. It is not clear, in other words, whether such statements do any work at all. They certainly do nothing to motivate a reading of the Logic and may even simply reinforce well-established prejudices. For this reason, I have decided in this introduction to focus on the Logic's problematic nature as such. My claim is that the Logic is to be read as still in line with Kant's Transcendental Logic, though without being transcendental in Kant's sense. But once this determination is made, another issue immediately arises. Of course, however philosophically important the Logic might still be, the fact remains that it is a dated document. Why Hegel should ever have wanted to attempt it needs historical explanation. And this I have done with as much detail as space allowed. But the problem is that the moment one departs from a purely historical account and takes a definite stand on the nature of the Logic, one is immediately faced with a host of conflicting interpretations, both classic and recent, and, while one cannot enter in an introduction into an extended polemical debate with them, to ignore them would smack of dogmatism. I have tried to negotiate my way out of this dilemma by bringing out the fault lines in the Logic along which different and even contradictory readings are possible. I neither ignore nor dismiss these readings, even though I perforce refer to them globally. For the classic and more metaphysical of them there was no problem singling out J. M. E. McTaggart as the representative figure. But the state of the recent, in spirit more hermeneutic readings is still much too fluid for singling out any representative figure. Hence, although I shall mention the occasional name in footnotes, I shall refer to these more recent developments only in general, without emblematic representation. Between these two extremes, a host of more qualified readings are available in the literature. I hope that, by motivating a study of the Logic, I also motivate a study of all this literature.