long with J.G. Fichte and, at least in his early work, F.W.J. von Schelling, Hegel (1770–1831) belongs to the period of German idealism in the decades following Kant. The most systematic of the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel attempted, throughout his published writings as well as in his lectures, to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic philosophy from a purportedly logical starting point. He is perhaps most well-known for his teleological account of history, an account that was later taken over by Marx and “inverted” into a materialist theory of an historical development culminating in communism. While idealist philosophies in Germany post-dated Hegel (Beiser 2014), the movement commonly known as German idealism effectively ended with Hegel’s death. Certainly since the revolutions in logical thought from the turn of the twentieth century, the logical side of Hegel’s thought has been largely forgotten, although his political and social philosophy and theological views have continued to find interest and support. Since the 1970s, however, a degree of more general philosophical interest in Hegel’s systematic thought and its logical basis has been revived.
The first thing to be emphasized here is that we shouldnt think of judgments and their contents as something like mental contentssubjective or psychological states of a thinkers mind. Such a psychologistic attitude was opposed by Hegel just as it was opposed by a figure as central to modern logic as Gottlob Frege. For Frege, thoughts are not mental, rather they are abstract entities like numbers, so the problem facing us is not how to go from mental contents to the concrete world, it is how to go from abstract to concrete ones. But here we must keep in mind Hegels two-fold way of thinking about judgments, de dicto and de re, and while it is usual to think of the contents of de dicto judgments as abstract (here to think of the content as propositional is usual), some have thought of the contents of de re judgments as including the thing itself (the re) that the judgment is about. (In fact Bertrand Russell had, at points in his
id: cf2f41083c0811199398485d48f6eeaa - page: 35
) Thus when Hegel characterizes some judgment structures (typically perception based judgments) as judgments of existence one might take the perceived thing itself as straightforwardly part of the content of the judgment. It is a concrete object, but not grasped as a concrete simple, but grasped in relation to what is judged of it in the predicate. And to the extent that judgments can be considered components of syllogisms, we might appreciate how syllogisms might have become contentful in a process that has culminated in the concrete syllogism of necessity.
id: 3e565ed5dcce3dcc802b4bd929e4a483 - page: 36
If the concrete object of a de re judgment is effectively what had been under consideration in Chapter 2, Perception, in the Phenomenology (the thing with properties), we now might envisage where Hegels thought is headed in these sections of the subjective logic. In the Phenomenology it turned out that the capacity for a subject to entertain objects of consciousness such as perceptual ones was that such a subject was capable of self-consciousness. It then turned out that to be capable of self-consciousness the subject had to exist in a world with other embodied subjects whose intentions it could recognize. It is here that we might pick up Robert Brandoms suggestion, following Sellars, that we should think of the existence of inferential processes or processes of reasoning as presupposing participation within social communicative interactions in which the making of an assertion is considered as a move in a language-game of the giving and asking for reasons. In short, we may think of Heg
id: 8e01cc9bdc0d3bcad5eef7ebc780e4c8 - page: 36
Formally considered we might think of this syllogism as the logical schematization of the
id: e50bf9858c035707f7ebf8fc83d335ff - page: 36