Hegel’s Logic from A Logical Point of View1

Abstract

My title is not intended as a pun. Rather it should be interpreted as a question: how to deal with Hegel’s logic from a logical point of view? I mean here by ‘a logical point of view’ the point of view which adheres to the body of logical truths that we can formulate in classical propositional logic and first- order predicate logic. That is not necessarily a conservative stand, only a careful one. The question indicates that one should be prepared to adopt a critical point of view concerning Hegel’s logic. The fact that most logicians are not interested in Hegel’s logic is a sign that such a critical attitude is not uncommon. Three years ago, I asked Professor Quine how one could go about Hegel’s dialectical logic. He simply answered that one would have to change the laws of logic in order to make sense of Hegel’s logic.² I doubt that there is anyone who would be ready to support Hegel to such an extent as to abandon the corpus of our logical laws. I do not think either that one has to drive to extremities to extract some logical sense from what Hegel called Die Wissenschaft der Logik.