A commentary on Hegel's logic

Unconscious Abyss, The: Hegel's Anticipation of Psychoanalysis

THE PROVINCE OF CONCEPTUAL REASON: HEGEL’S POST-KANTIAN RATIONALISM W. Clark Wolf, B.S., M.A. Marquette University, 2019 In this dissertation, I seek to explain G.W.F. Hegel’s view that human accessible conceptual content can provide knowledge about the nature or essence of things. I call this view “Conceptual Transparency.” It finds its historical antecedent in the views of eighteenth century German rationalists, which were strongly criticized by Immanuel Kant. I argue that Hegel explains Conceptual Transparency in such a way that preserves many implications of German rationalism, but in a form that is largely compatible with Kant’s criticisms of the original rationalist version. After providing background on Hegel’s relationship to the traditional rationalist theory of concepts and Kant’s challenge to it, I claim that Hegel’s central task is to provide a theory of conceptual content that allows a relationship to the objective world without being dependent on the specifically sensory aspect of the world, which Kant’s theory of concepts required. Since many interpreters deny that Hegel’s use of the term “concept” is comparable to other historical philosophers (or our own), I first show that Hegel’s critique of standard conceptions of concepts presupposes an agreement of subject matter. I then show how Hegel’s account of the “formal concept” provides the skeleton for a view of conceptual content that relies on negative relations between terms, rather than a relation to sensibility, to provide content. Hegel’s account of conceptual content is completed when he shows how a universal term is further specified so that it can determine singular objects. This occurs in its adequate form in a teleological process. I argue that Hegel’s account of teleology in the Science of Logic is an attempt to explain how and where Conceptual Transparency obtains. A teleological process is one in which a concept constitutes an object, and this means that a concept is perfectly adequate to express that thing’s nature and not merely to represent it. However, in the final chapter, I show that Hegel’s concept of teleology is meant paradigmatically to illuminate how human purposive processes have constituted a social world that is conceptually accessible to us. In this way, the primary “province” of Hegel’s rationalism is the human constructed world.

background

/pdf/the-province-of-conceptual-reason-hegel-s-post-kantian-2shrejuhu5.pdf

The Province of Conceptual Reason: Hegel's Post-Kantian Rationalism

The purpose of this study is to consider whether the style of economic thinking associated with A.C. Pigou falls within the general thought style established by his predecessor in the Cambridge Chair of Political Economy, Alfred Marshall. The dissertation attempts to reconcile opposing perspectives on Pigou that have arisen in the literature by clarifying Pigou’s position as a ‘Marshallian’ using Ludwik Fleck's notion of a ‘thought style’ that is shared amongst practitioners of a science, with Fleck also referring to the communal carrier of a particular thought style as a ‘thought collective’. Notwithstanding significant differences that arose between Pigou’s and Marshall’s representations of economic theory, this study contends that Pigou’s economics continued to fall within the broad category of a Marshallian ‘thought style’, although it evolved and adapted to a more formalist representation of theory under Pigou’s leadership.

A.C. Pigou and the 'Marshallian' Thought Style: A Study in the Philosophy and Mathematics Underlying Cambridge Economics

forms of life characteristic of its (capitalist) context, while remaining bound to the immediacy of the forms of appearance of that context” (Postone, 2002: 79). Regarding modern Western science, Lukacs asserts: The more highly developed it [modern science] becomes and the more scientific, the more it will become a formally closed system of partial laws. It will then find that the world lying beyond its confines, and in particular the material base which it is its task to understand, its own concrete underlying reality lies, methodologically and in principle, beyond its grasp. (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 104) Lukacs here criticizes the economist Tugan-Baranovsky’s attempts to explain production in purely quantitative terms. The formalism of bourgeois thought, according to Lukacs, has political implications: The reified world appears henceforth quite definitively—and in philosophy, under the spotlight of ‘criticism it is potentiated still further—as the only possible world, the only conceptually accessible, comprehensible world vouchsafed for us humans (...) By confining itself to the study of the ‘possible conditions’ of the validity of the forms in which its underlying existence is manifested, modern bourgeois thought bars its own way to a clear view of the problems bearing on the birth and death of these forms, and on their real essence and substratum. (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 110) Lukacs then works through the antinomies of bourgeois thought, as indicated by the problems and contradictions of modern Western philosophy. Here Lukacs focuses on Kant’s concept of the thing-in-itself and the more general notion that the world can be known to us to the degree to which it is created by us. Lukacs (1971 [1923]: 112) regards the latter as the defining problem of modern Western philosophy. However, Lukacs is not simply interested in the intellectual history of Western philosophy. Rather, his aim is to 90 Tugan-Baranovsky’s student, Nikolai Kondratiev, would later become well known for his theory of longterm cycles of economic expansion and contraction. It is interesting to note here the connection to Arrighi (1994), whose theory of structural transformation within the capitalist world-system, which draws heavily from Kondratiev, I critique in chapter four along lines similar to, yet distinct from, Lukacs’s critique of Tugan-Baranovsky. 85 grasp “the connection between the fundamental problems of this philosophy and the basis in existence from which these problems spring and to which they strive to return by the road of the understanding” (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 112). When writing about the idea that the world can be known to us to the degree to which it is created by us, Lukacs (1971 [1923]: 112) indicates that the question of “why and with what justification” we should view this human-created world as constitutive of human reason never arises. According to Lukacs, the reason this basic question never arises can be explained with reference to the intrinsic relationship between social structure and subjectivity. To put it another way, Lukacs explains that bourgeois thought exhibits a “double tendency,” which is also characteristic of bourgeois society, and that it expresses this opposition between an objective material world and subjective consciousness: On the one hand, it [bourgeois thought] acquires increasing control over the details of its social existence, subjecting them to its needs. On the other hand it loses—likewise progressively—the possibility of gaining intellectual control of society as a whole and with that it loses its own qualification for leadership. (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 121) Lukacs (1971 [1923]: 122) believes this problem is ultimately rooted in the division between theory and practice. Lukacs’s theory of praxis seeks to move beyond traditional subject-object epistemology. He indicates that both subject and object develop simultaneously through practice—and that this process is thoroughly dialectical. In other words, through praxis the subject both constitutes and is constituted by social structure. This practical activity, according to Lukacs, is also historically determinate. It is on this basis that Lukacs is able ground his explanation of the antinomies of bourgeois thought, particularly the opposition between objective matter and subjective consciousness, in the relationship between social structure and subjectivity, a relationship reflective of the contradictory nature of modern capitalist society: [M]an in capitalist society confronts a reality ‘made’ by himself (as a class) which appears to him to be a natural phenomenon alien to himself; he is wholly at the mercy of its ‘laws’, his activity is confined to the exploitation of the inexorable fulfillment of certain individual laws for his own (egoistic) interests. But even while ‘acting’ he remains, in the nature of the case, the object and not the subject of events. The field of his activity thus becomes wholly internalized: it consists on the one hand of the awareness of the laws which he uses and, on the other, of his awareness of his inner reactions to the course taken by events. (Lukacs, 1971 [1923]: 135)

/pdf/sociobiophysicality-cold-war-and-critical-theor-y-human-vrtnkmh9f4.pdf

Sociobiophysicality, Cold War, and Critical Theor y: Human-Ecological Transformation and Contemporary Ecological Subjectivity

THE SUBLATION OF DIALECTICS: HEGEL AND THE LOGIC OF AUFHEBUNG Ryan Krahn Advisor: University of Guelph, 2014 Jay Lampert This dissertation is a study of the concept of Aufhebung, or sublation, as it arises in G. W. F. Hegel’s dialectical logic. Its chief contention is that this concept not be understood to function simply as a mere negation of negation, where that would mean an assimilatory determinate negation of a prior moment of abstract negation. Instead, it is argued that both abstract and determinate negation function at the level of sublation as such and that the concept should thereby be understood not only as a synthesis that combines a term with its antithesis, i.e., a unifying third term, but also as a fourth that treats these terms in their difference, holding them apart as oppositional. The quadruplicity of sublation here is discerned through analyses of the figure of servile selfconsciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the concepts of becoming and the Absolute in the Science of Logic and the Encyclopaedia Logic. This reinterpretation of Hegel’s theory of negation is contrasted with the critical responses of a few of his critics, especially Jacques Derrida and Georges Bataille, which are shown to fail both as critiques of Hegel and as philosophical alternatives to dialectics.

A commentary on Hegel's logic

Citations

Unconscious Abyss, The: Hegel's Anticipation of Psychoanalysis

The Province of Conceptual Reason: Hegel's Post-Kantian Rationalism

A.C. Pigou and the 'Marshallian' Thought Style: A Study in the Philosophy and Mathematics Underlying Cambridge Economics

Sociobiophysicality, Cold War, and Critical Theor y: Human-Ecological Transformation and Contemporary Ecological Subjectivity

The Sublation of Dialectics: Hegel and the Logic of Aufhebung

Related Papers (5)

The Logic of the Third Man

What Is Logic

Hegel's Hermeneutics

Alternative Systems of Logic

Notes on logic