3 - Hegel's conception of logic

Summary

Hegel has two books that are called Science of Logic, but neither of them resembles what normally serves as a logic text. Instead of beginning with symbols and rules, they start by talking about “being,” “nothing,” and “becoming.” And the structures of formal inference appear only well into the third and final part, called the “Doctrine of Conceiving.”

Because of this discrepancy between expectation and actuality, many interpreters discount the term “logic” in the title of the two works and discuss their content in terms of metaphysics or, if they are of a Kantian frame of mind, in terms of a transcendental system of categories. Yet Hegel seemed to be serious when he placed them under the rubric of the traditional discipline. The smaller of the two versions, the first part of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), continued to develop through the two subsequent editions of that work in 1827 and 1830. And the larger version was being extensively revised when Hegel died in 1831. The question to be asked, then, is: What did Hegel mean by “logic”?