This article discusses two topics, both commonly referred to using the label “the beginning of Hegel's Logic”: (1) Hegel's justification for the claim that a science of logic must begin by considering the concept of “pure being”. (2) Hegel's account of the concepts “being”, “nothing”, and “becoming” in the first chapter of his Logic. Discussing recent work on both of these topics, two primary claims are defended: Regarding (1): the strongest interpretations of Hegel's case for beginning a science of logic (...) with the concept of pure being are those which take him to argue that this concept must be necessarily both “immediate” and “mediated” at the same time. Regarding (2): The widespread tendency to take Hegel's treatment of the concepts of being, nothing, and becoming as an example with which to illustrate his “dialectical method” should be replaced with an interpretation of that chapter which understands it to rather make possible the kind of dialectical transitions which make up the rest of Hegel's Science of Logic. (shrink)

Although contemporary powers metaphysics largely understands itself as a metaphysical realist undertaking, recently powers have come to the surface also within an idealist context. This paper aims to characterize and motivate an absolute idealist conception of powers. I compare realist and idealist powers metaphysics in their respective responses to Humean scepticism concerning powers, thereby motivating the claim that the very idea of a power is actually best understood as an idealist idea. I continue to characterize the absolute idealist’s understanding of (...) power, for which it is necessary to see that the content of her power notion is inseparable from the way in which she arrives at that notion. I close with a brief reflection on the absolute idealist’s understanding of the power of thought, which is where idealist and realist powers metaphysics diverge most radically. (shrink)

Robert Pippin's recent study of Hegel's Logic, Hegel's Realm of Shadows, argues that we should read Hegel as rejecting the need for a Transcendental Deduction in logic because he takes Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, to have ruled out the scepticism that motivates Kant's Deduction. By contrast, I argue, we cannot understand what Pippin calls the ‘identity’ of logic and metaphysics in the Science of Logic unless we see how Hegel does provide a kind of Deduction argument in the (...) Logic, albeit one stripped of the psychologism present in the Kantian version. Accordingly, I provide a sketch of what such an ‘absolute’ Deduction must look like, and argue that Hegel's presentation of the ‘absolute idea’ functions as the conclusion of such an argument. (shrink)