Hegel contends that judgements are contradictory, finite and untrue. Prominent schol- ars argue that Hegel’s issue with judgements is resolved in the later stages of his Logic. Specifically, Ng suggests that this solution is found in Hegel’s discussion of life. In this article, I argue that not only does life fail to resolve Hegel’s problem with judgement— death highlights its insolubility. To support this claim, I examine Hegel’s discussion of judgements in the Logic, showing that judgements are inherently contradictory because (...) they both unite and separate individuals and universals. Instead of being resolved ret- rospectively, I demonstrate that contradiction, finitude and untruth are intrinsic to judgements. Moreover, since judgements play a constitutive and determinative role in Hegel’s metaphysics, they pass their contradictions, finitude and untruth onto the objects they constitute. Specifically, I argue that for living beings, judgement is literally a matter of life and death, because the contradiction of judgements implies the finitude of the objects they constitute—namely, the perishability of things and the mortality of organisms. (shrink)

1. Does Hegel’s The Science of Logic (Hegel 2010) have any relation to or relevance for what is now known as ‘the science of logic’? Here a negative answer is as likely to be endorsed by many conte...

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)

Dialectic has been rejected or dogmatically accepted by many philosophers. The modern history of dialectic began with Kant who, however, regarded it as deceptive. Fichte and Schelling contributed to the formation of the theory of dialectic by developing the concepts such as the absolute, spirit, reason and speculation. Hegel did the further clarification of those concepts by exhibiting their necessary interconnection, which was systematically expounded in Science of Logic. Dialectic in Logic can be grasped with three key concepts: the absolute, (...) contradiction and sublation, and the identity of thought and being. In Logic, through the doctrines of being, essence and the concept, the necessary development of categories is expressed as the selfmovement of the absolute, which culminates in the absolute idea. Logic is for Hegel the exposition of God as the thought which thinks of itself. Therefore the truth of logic is the thought's returning to itself as a full circle of the descriptions of thought itself. Dialectic is the activity of this self-thinking thought. Contradiction immanent in every category, and its sublation, is the generator of all the development of categories. Only through the whole process of logic can the identity of thought and being be known as the truth. However, as the later generations argued, Hegel's interpretations was biased as his emphasis was on the self-identity of thought to itself. Dialectic is to be re-grasped with the emphasis on the self-development of reality. This entails the cognition that the reality enforces the human mind to recognise the dynamism of ever-moving reality that is dialectical. However, dialectic is not to be regarded as the collection of principles, but to be re-conceptualised as the necessary development, and thus the explication, of reality through our thought. Dialectic is this truth as the identity of reality and thought. (shrink)