Aristotle argued that there are no true statements of the form. In his lectures on history of philosophy Hegel does not challenge this view and in his Science of Logic expresses admiration for Aristotle's rebuttal of Zeno of Elea's attempt to find such contradictions in his paradoxes of motion. Yet more than once in his logics Hegel insists that everything is contradictory. I approach this problem from two directions. First, Widerspruch often means, and is understood by Hegel to mean, ‘opposition’ (...) rather than ‘contradiction’ in the strict logical sense. Thus Catullus's simultaneous love and hatred of Clodia is a contradiction, but not an Aristotelian, or formal logical, contradiction. I defuse Hegel's occasional suggestions of Aristotelian contradictions in motion and time. Second, I exploit Hegel's tacit rejection of Aristotle's official bivalence account of truth and falsity, in favour of the view that truth is approached by successive improvements in our inevitably imperfect attempts to attain it. In this respect Hegel's procedure is similar to that of Aristotle himself, who characteristically constructs his own view of metaphysics, physics, ethics, etc., from the imperfect, but not flatly false, opinions of his predecessors. ‘The truth is the whole’, that is, the whole sequence of our attempts to reach it. (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)

This essay evaluates Hegel's claim that the phenomenon of time exhibits a quantitative logic in the context of a paradox concerning temporal presence. On the one hand, in time, the present always is. It seems that the very nature of time, assuming that it is really passing, requires us to assent to the continuous being of the present. If time is always passing, there must always be a present when the passing actually occurs and thus when beings actually exist. On (...) the other hand, any particular moment of presence, as a point or an interval, immediately ceases to be or has not yet come to be. And, because of this, no delineated moment can be purely self-present. Conceived as an unextended point, presence would be nothing enduring of its own against time's passing, while, conceived as an interval, presence contains before and after within itself, meaning as an interval that is not actually present at once. The paradox is therefore that time's passing demands we think being present and presence as being, while being present, strictly speaking, seems impossible due precisely to that passing. Hegel claims to reconcile the self-same form of presence, a presence that always is, with continuous change under the category of quantity. However, I argue that the non-identity between the logical category and the phenomenon of time renders this reconciliation ineffective against the paradox, breaking down, more specifically, as it concerns the formation of a temporal magnitude. I evaluate alternative Hegelian interpretations for determining whether the irresolvability of the paradox proves problematic after all, arguing that the paradox in fact presents a significant problem for the conceivability of temporal existence. (shrink)

The notion of modernism, originally a classificatory term in art and literary criticism, now a common term of art in many philosophic (and anti?philosophic) programs, has remained an elusive, often vague point of view. For a discussion of the notion's historical accuracy and philosophic legitimacy this article selects an author greatly responsible for setting out the problem (called by him ?nihilism') and philosophically sensitive to the issues involved in claiming that something essential to a tradition has ?ended? and something new (...) ?begun?: Nietzsche. Such issues are: what needs to be shown in order to demonstrate that indeed a complete ?break? in a tradition has occurred, especially if part of that claim is that this break ought to have occurred? And: what consequences follow, particularly with respect to the possibility of ?post?modern? ?justification'? Nietzsche's answers to these questions are more subtle than has been appreciated, and can, when pursued properly, help reveal the strengths and weaknesses of such post?Nietzscheans as Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida. (shrink)

This paper provides a reconstruction and analysis of Marx’s early engagements with logic, and especially his studies of Hegel’s logic, on the one hand, and Hegel’s great if often overlooked critic Adolf Trendelenburg, on the other. It itemises the archival evidence that Marx read and planned to compose a Hegelian response to Trendelenburg’s devastating attack on dialectics in his 1840 Logische Untersuchungen – the work that arguably did more than any other single text to destroy the influence of Hegelianism among (...) German intellectuals at the time. It argues that the young Marx was a more sophisticated reader of Hegel and of philosophy in general than is typically acknowledged. Against the backdrop of these claims, it then proposes a new reading of Marx’s work from 1839 to 1842 – one that takes the emphasis off the familiar distinction between materialism and idealism, which was as much an invention of Engels’s later interpretations of the early Marx as it was an invention of Marx himself, and places it instead on what early nineteenth-century thinkers would have understood to be the more comprehensive question of logic. (shrink)

One of the most interesting debates in Hegel scholarship today comes from the question of how to interpret Hegel’s treatment of contradiction in the Science of Logic.1 Some interpreters claim that Hegel defiantly disregards the basic law of noncontradiction, which states that something cannot both be and not be in the same time, manner, or place, proposing instead that for Hegel true contradictions really do exist, and not only in rational conception but equally in the very fabric of reality. However, (...) other interpreters propose less direct readings of Hegel’s thesis from productive contradiction, either by limiting Hegel’s conception of contradiction to only certain forms, such as only in... (shrink)