John Burbidge-King

By comparing the argument in the first edition of Hegel’s Science of Logic with that of the second we find that he not only introduces significant changes but indicates why he found the changes necessary. As over time he rethought his method in the course of his annual lectures he realised that pure thought should not anticipate results but follow from the inherent sense of each term. The details of his logical method suggest how the novelties that emerge in history can require the introduction of new modified categories.

The Logic interpreted by Professor Harris is the Encyclopaedia Logic translated by Wallace. He goes through it chapter by chapter and provides explanations of the various concepts and transitions, using references to the larger Logic, illustrations from the philosophy of nature, and anticipations of subsequent sections. His interpretation is essentially Spinozistic: the ultimate point of reference is the whole. And the dialectical development is the result of thought’s comparing its immediate concepts with “the whole immanent in them, which figures in each as what it aspires, yet fails to be”.

At a time when Hegel studies were virtually non-existent in North America, Emil Fackenheim began teaching at the University of Toronto, in a department strongly committed to the history of philosophy. He taught medieval philosophy to third-year students in the honours program, and a course on metaphysics and the philosophy of history to students in fourth year honors, a combination of interests that found expression in his Aquinas Lectures of 1961: Metaphysics and Historicity. It was, however, his graduate course on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, given for over thirty years, that inspired many to take up the challenge of German idealism. “One day I took my courage in my hands and told F. H. [Anderson, then head of the department] that I wanted to teach a course on Hegel. ‘Do you understand Hegel?’ he asked. The question was more like an assault. ‘Yes,’ I lied, and went on to teach Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel in all the years ahead.”

John Burbidge shows that, far from incorporating everything into an all-consuming necessity, Hegel's philosophy requires the novelty of unexpected contingencies to maintain its systematic pretensions. To know without fear of failure is to expect that experience will confound our confident claims to knowledge. And the universal character of all life involves acting, discovering what happens as a result, and incorporating both intention and result into a new comprehensive understanding. Burbidge explores how Hegel applied this approach when he turned from his logic to chemistry, biology, psychology and history, and suggests how a Hegelian might function within the changed circumstances of contemporary science

Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel is now recognized as one of the great philosophers; his concept of the dialectic profoundly influenced the course of Western thought, and—particularly through the lens of Marxist philosophy—continues to exert great influence even today. Yet Hegel himself has often been accused of being a philosopher of reaction: on the political sphere the polar opposite of Marx. It was not until the publication of Jacques D’Hondt’s Hegel en son temps that the vision of Hegel as a supporter of the oppressive post-Napoleonic regime in Prussia gave way to the realization that Hegel was appointed by the liberal wing of the Prussian bureaucracy, that he frequently was at odds with the reactionary forces, and that he supported many of the leading student activists of his day. Hegel en son temps has previously been translated into German and Italian, but has never before been available in English. Its publication now will be welcomed throughout the English-speaking world by scholars and students alike.