This article aims to restore a way to approach Derrida by revisiting the essentialist ‘logic’ that Leonard Lawlor put forward in 2002. Lawlor argues that the early Derrida developed a ‘logic of totality’ from Hyppolite's reading of Hegel, which formed the basis for a ‘logic of contamination’ and différance; moreover, Lawlor demonstrated such progress. We will situate his implicit premises before following his sequential argument, and thus isolate how Lawlor is aware that Derrida disputes Hyppolite's basic premises and outcomes, so (...) as to suggest the difficulty is methodological. By that we will support Lawlor's discovery that Derrida's earliest work can be approached ‘logically’, so as to help re-orientate both an approach and strands of thought that Derrida helped to inspire. (shrink)

Perhaps one of the most difficult passages in Hegel's Science of Logic is his treatment of contradiction. If each moment of Hegel's logic is understood to constitute a sort of proof and since contradiction itself is presented as a moment of the logic, then in what sense can one comprehend a proof of contradiction as such? It is difficult to formulate this in any way that does not sound fundamentally incoherent, since it is not just at odds with our ordinary (...) way of thinking but also with the overwhelming majority of the Western philosophical tradition. The basic problem, essentially, is this: if Hegel's logic includes contradiction as one of its moments, then how is Hegel's entire philosophical project not simply incoherent? In the first part of this article, I will attempt to demonstrate one way in which Hegel's treatment of contradiction could in fact be considered coherent, through a close reading of the relevant passages. In this reading, I will particularly focus on the function of Hegel's dialectical concept of sublation (aufheben), and attempt to show (by example) how analysing Hegel's nuanced use of sublation can help us to work through some of his logic's complexities. The overall purpose here will be to present a systematic (as opposed to historical) exposition of Hegel's concept of contradiction and to illustrate the important role that this concept (as the contradiction of contradiction) plays in Hegel's logical method. (shrink)

The article aims to show that Priest wrongly associates Hegel’s dialectic with his dialetheism. Even if Priest correctly argues that the notion of contradiction in Hegel’s logic is a logical one and that contradiction is meant to be true, Hegel goes a long way beyond Priest’s dialetheism insofar as he is not committed to a dialetheist conception of a three truth-values logic. I start my analysis with a brief introductory overview of the dialetheist’s thesis of the truth of contradiction. Then, (...) in the first part of the article, I show that Hegel’s notion of contradiction can be equated with a logical contradiction and that Hegel argues that some contradictions are true. In the second part of the paper I show that Hegel’s thesis of the truth of contradiction is different from Priest’s, because Hegel endorses a developmental conception of truth which allows him to account for complex and dynamic properties of reality in a way that Priest’s does not allow. (shrink)

In this paper, we interpret a 19th century diagram, which is meant to visualise G.W.F. Hegel’s entire method of the `Science of Logic' on the basis of bitwise operations. For the interpretation of the diagram we use a binary numeral system, and discuss whether the anti-Hegelian argument associated with it is valid or not. The reinterpretation is intended to make more precise rules of construction, a stricter binary code and a review of strengths and weaknesses of the critique.

I explain Kant’s critique of Leibniz’s rejection of real opposition in the Amphiboly in the context of Kant’s pre-Critical writings on vis viva and negative magnitudes and his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Properly contextualized in terms of the vis viva controversy, I argue, Kant’s arguments against Leibniz succeed, even though they are laden with theoretical inconsistencies and operate under false physical premises.

In the context of a dialogue between Kant and Hegel, this paper aims at presenting some aspects of the reception that Hegel made in the Logic of Being on the so-called notion of Inbegriff aller Realität. It is a notion that Hegel retrieves and examines dialectically and speculatively, not just in a way of an exposition. The paper seeks to identify and explain the main connections of the moments in which Hegel, in the field of the development of a pure (...) logic, first turns the reality into negation and then into contradiction. (shrink)