Lectures on Logic

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Editor)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel gave many lectures in logic at Berlin University between 1818 and his untimely death in 1831. Edited posthumously by Hegel's son, Karl, these lectures were published in German in 2001 and now appear in English for the first time. Because they were delivered orally, Lectures on Logic is more approachable and colloquial than much of Hegel's formal philosophy. The lectures provide important insight into Hegel's science of logic, dialectical method, and symbolic logic. Clark Butler's smooth translation helps readers understand the rationality of Hegel's often dark and difficult thought. Readers at all levels will find a mature and particularly clear presentation of Hegel's systematic philosophical vision.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher and one of the founding figures of German Idealism. Influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism and Rousseau's politics, Hegel formulated an elaborate system of historical development of ethics, government, and religion through the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute. Hegel was one of the most well-known historicist philosopher, and his thought presaged continental philosophy, including postmodernism. His system was inverted into a materialist ideology by Karl Marx, originally a member of the Young Hegelian faction.

Reviews

[Enrique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hey, it’s definitely not an easy one, but it’s still a lot more easier than the science of logic. I’m now sure that any Hegel introduction that you read it’s not a good one.

Hegel tried to show the eternal movement of the world and thoughts in his own philosophical system. It’s not a static conceptual work, not an architecture of thinking like Kant, it’s more like a eternal constructor and destructor of the concept, he shows in his obscurity that there is not a way to grasp a eternal truth, is always in process the truth, the being, the nothing, everything it’s in process, the essence of everything is this movement.

The negation it’s the basic moment of his thinking, negation is the key to follow the idea, the concept it’s in itself a negation, but also have external negations, and the negation of the negation it’s the fulfillment of the idea in the concept.

Hegel put some examples to digest easily what he is trying to say. But boy, anyway you are going to suffer. The obscurity its inevitable, he is difficult to follow, and the most clearest paths are always at a dead end, because the clarity of the thinking it’s the false, it’s the static that Hegel doesn’t like because it’s the dead meat of thinking.

Nice book, not a summer read.