A STUDY OF
HEGEL’S LOGIC
WARDEN OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXTORD
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1950Oxfard Unroeriity Presi, Aman Hom; LIMES. 4
GLASGOW MEW YORK TOXORTO MELROURNE WELLINOTOW
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS CAYE TOW
Genffrey Cumberlege, Publisher to the University
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAINPREFACE
To very many modern philosophers modern philosophy
seems pretty well sufficient unto itsélf. It could, indeed,
surprise no serious historian of philosophy to find an alliance
of empiricism and logical analysis indifferent or hostile to
most thinkers of the past. Yet there may still be some stu-
dents of philosophy, young as well as old, who feel a sense
of oppression and sterility when they attempt to labour in the
confined atmosphere of modern philosophic thought. They
may wonder whether where there are no roots there can be
any fruit, To them it may still seem that ‘there is a world else-
where’, and that the wider fields in which great thinkers
used to range and sow have long enough lain fallow or been
but sparsely cropped. They may even Fear that, unless those
fields are once again vigorously tilled, not professional philo-
sophy only but all civilization is threatened with a very
terrifying return of the dark ages. To them, I have thought,
a book on Hegel might not come amiss.
In that hope I published 4x Introduction to Hegel. A great
part of it was historical; the rest was mainly an attempt to
explain Hegel’s general conception of logic’as a clue to his
system. The present work is designed as a sequel, and I have
throughout it presupposed the detail of my Introduction,
Chapters II-XVIII contain an outline exposition of
Hegel's categories in which the main course of the Excyclo-
paedia, Part 1, is slightly modified and supplemented from
the Wissenschaft der Logik. 1 have tried to display as clear
a thread of thought as I believed I could disentangle from
the two versions together, but I have ignored entirely certain
sections of the larger Logic where the dialectic is so difficult
and so seemingly minute that, even if I were sure I under
stood its transitions, I should hesitate to. treat of them in a
work which is intended to be of some assistance even on a
first reading of Hegel. A comparison of Table I on the one
hand with the Table of the Encyclopaedia categories given in
Professor Stace’s Philosophy of Hegel,2 and on the other with
+ Clarendon Press, 1940. > Macmillan, 1923.