Negation, Contradiction and the World: Hegel’s Logic in the Light of the History of Logic

Prof Paul Redding (University of Sydney)

Hegel’s “logic” is perplexing and can often seem to have nothing to do with what is generally regarded as logic at all. In this paper I argue that Hegel’s odd version of the “Law of Contradiction”—the claim that “everything is inherently contradictory”—follows from his highly original account of the need for comprehensive thought to employ different and opposing logical forms that he identifies in the approaches of Aristotle and the Stoics respectively. Aristotle’s approach entailed a subject-centered conception of objecthood that was relevant to human practical activity but limited with respect to our practices of explanation. The approach of the Stoics better captured how unifying explanations are possible but at the expense of showing how our thoughts could be world-related. Needing to fulfill both functions, thought necessarily generates contradictions. This insight had, in a way, been signaled by Kant, but while Kant used it to deny the possibility of “metaphysical” knowledge, Hegel drew a different consequence: the objects known in metaphysics are necessarily contradictory.

Paul Redding is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophical and Historical Studies at the University of Sydney. He works mainly in the areas of Kantian philosophy and the tradition of German idealism. In particular he is interested in the relationship of the idealist tradition to the later movements of analytic philosophy and pragmatism, and in issues in idealist logic, philosophical psychology and philosophy of religion. He is the author of Hegel’s Hermeneutics (Cornell University Press, 1996), The Logic of Affect (Cornell University Press, 1999), Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche (Routledge, 2009).