Terry Pinkard

Our modern conditions require a reflective stance on our lives. Yet it is also clear that some forms of domination have continued to be practiced long after their insufficiencies have been exposed. What is actual and what lies behind the various appearances of our social and political world has never been fully actualized. This chapter examines this sense of being ready to unsettle our settled convictions through experiences that push us to think of what we have been doing up until now as something illusory and not as merely not living up to an explicit ideal. Part of the unsettling feature of modernity is that we can think that we have at least settled what we take to be at stake even while admitting that we have not lived up to such ideals, only to find that we turn out not to have settled what really was at stake.

Sally Sedgwick seems to be incapable of writing dull books, and she has once again given proof of this. She has written a short but very ambitious book, nominally on Hegel’s philosophy of history, but really about Hegel in general and how we should understand him. Her idea is that Hegel’s philosophy of history is a special entry point to Hegel’s thought as a whole so that instead of Hegel-the-philosopher-of-the-necessary-Absolute, we should see Hegel as fundamentally a philosopher of finitude, a proponent of the contingency and historical situatedness of all of our thoughts, who, as a philosopher of finite humility, did not think that we could ever assume the viewpoint of God as he is sometimes alleged to have tried to do.

Rahel Jaeggi says of her book: “The Hegelian idea of a dialectically self-enriching experiential learning process thus emerges as central to the entire project.” I examine and compare Jaeggi’s own uptake of Hegelian themes and consider them in light of her acceptance of Philip Kitcher’s distinction between ‘progress from’ and ‘progress towards’ conceptions of progress. Although there are some obvious differences between Jaeggi’s and Hegel’s conception of progress, I conclude by arguing that her way of taking things gets at the deeper roots of Hegel’s views as a non-teleological conception of history that brings into relief what is immanent to human agency.

MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE LOGIC RADULPHUS BRITO, Quaestiones super Priscianum minorern. Introduction and critical edition by H.W. Enders and J. Pinborg. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1980. 460 pp. 2 fascicules. DM 168 per fascicule. PAUL VINCENT SPADE, Peter of Ailly: concepts and insolubles. An annotated translation. (Synthese Historical Library, Volume 19.) Dordrecht, Holland: Boston, U.S.A.: London, England: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980. xii + 193 pp. Df1.60/$31.40. VINCENT FERRER, Tractatus de suppositionibus. Introduction and critical edition by J.A. Trentman. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977. 188 pp. No price stated. GABRIEL NUCHELMANS, Late scholastic and humanist theories of the proposition. Amsterdam, Oxford and New York: North Holland Publishing Co., 1980. 237 pp. Dfl.75.00/$36.50. LARRY HICKMAN, Modern theories of higher level predicates: second intentions in the Neuzeit. (Analytica. Investigations in Logic, Ontology and the Philosophy of Language.) Miinchen: Philosophia Verlag, 1980. 191 pp. DM 98. GERMAN TRADITIONS IN LOGIC JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre als Handschrift fiir seine Zuhörer (1794). Einleitung und Register von Wilhem G. Jacobs. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1979 (third edition). xxviii +272 pp. DM 23. GOTTHARD GUNTHER, Grundziige einer neuen Theorie des Denkens in Hegels’ Logik. Zweite Auflage. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1978. xx+226 pp. DM 26. DIEGO MARCONI (ed.), La formalizzazione della dialettica. Turin: Rosemberg &Sellier, 1979. 474pp. No price stated. SUBSTANCE >M.J. Loux, Substance and attribute: a study in ontology. (Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, volume 14.) Dordrecht, Boston and London: Reidel, 1978. xi + 187 pp. $29.00 (cloth)/$11.95 (paper). DAVID WIGGINS, Sameness and substance. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. xi + 238 pp. £12.50. EDITIONS OF FREGE GOTTLOB FREGE, Posthumous writings. Translated by P. Long and R. White, with the assistance of R. Hargreaves. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979. viii+288pp. £15.00. GOTTLOB FREGE, Philosophical and mathematical correspondence. Translated by Hans Kaal, abridged by Brian McGuinness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. xviii +214 pp. £15.00. G. FREGE, Schriften zur Logik und Sprachphilosophie. Aus dem NachlaB mit Einleitung, Anmerkungen, Bibliographie und Register herausgegeben von G. Gabriel. 2. Aufl. Hamburg: Meiner 1978. xxx + 224 pp. DM 25. PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE ERNEST NAGEL, The structure of science: problems in the logic of scientific explanation. London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, paperback edition 1979. xiii + 618 pp. £4.95 (paper). JENNIFER TRUSTED, The logic of scientific inference: an introduction. Foreword by Sir Peter Medawar. London: The MacMillan Press, 1979. xii + 145 pp. £8.00. G. TORALDO DI FRANCIA (ed.) Problems in the foundations of physics. (Proceedings of the International School of Physics ‘Enrico Fermi’, Course LXXII, Varenna, Italy, 25th July-6th August 1977.) Amsterdam and New York: North Holland Publishing Company, 1979. xvii + 500 pp. US $87.75/dfl.180.00. A.-F. SCHMID, Une philosophie de savant. Henri Poincar6 et la logique mathématique. Paris: Maspéro, 1978. 175 pp. No price stated. LOGIC AND LANGUAGE LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Notebooks 1914-16. Second edition. Edited by G.H. Von Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe. English translation by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979. 231 pp. £8.95 SAUL A. KRIPKE, Naming and necessity. Revised and enlarged edition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publisher, 1980. 172 pp. £7.95. M.A.E. DUMMETT, Truth and other enigmas. London: Duckworth, 1978. lvii + 470 pp. £24.00. MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS JAAKKO LOUNELA, Die Logik im XVII. Jahrundert in Finnland. (Annales Academiae Fennicae. Dissertationes Humanarum Litterarum, no. 17.) Helsinki: Suomlainer Tiedeakatemia, 1978. vi + 188 pp. No price stated. BERNARD BOLZANO, Grundlegung der Logik. (Selections and synopses from Volumes I and I1 of Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre, second edition.) Edition and introduction by Friedrich Kambartel. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1978. lxxi + 380 pp. DM 38 (paper). HERBERT MEHRTENS, Die Entstehung der Verbandstheorie. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1979. ix + 363 pp. DM 42. JANE BRIDGE [KISTER], Beginning model theory. The completeness theorem and some consequences. (Oxford Logic Guides.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. viii + 143 pp. $10.00.

Hegel and Wittgenstein at first seem like an odd pairing: Hegel, the system builder who sought unity and who created a corresponding and forbidding technical vocabulary; and Wittgenstein, whose model was clarity and who focused on the heterogeneity of language. I argue that there is a shared problem at the core of their philosophies. Both are concerned with the limits of thought. This leads Wittgenstein in the Tractatus to a conception of the subject of thinking that dovetails in crucial ways with Hegel’s conception of subjectivity; perhaps surprisingly, the Tractatus and the Science of Logic turn out to be in many basic ways, as it were, the same book, except for the latter’s more detailed account of self-conscious subjectivity. Likewise, in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the very idea of an objective world is bound up with the idea of that world showing itself to thinking, self-conscious creatures.

The Phenomenology is organized into six theses: (1) All consciousness is self-consciousness. (2) Self-consciousness is social self-consciousness. (3) Spirit (Geist) is self-conscious life, and this is to be conceived generically in terms of social self-consciousness. (4) Self-conscious life has a history of that to which it collectively takes itself to be absolutely committed, a history which is as much ideal as it is material. (5) This history is progressive (and in that sense, somewhat teleological), and it culminates in modern life after the finalization of the French Revolution, with two different but related accounts of that progress (namely, the history of spirit and the history of religion). (6) The thesis about the centrality of self-consciousness is what the Phenomenology as a whole is about and at the end turns out to have both a theoretical and practical significance. The Phenomenology itself and the system to which it gives rise afterward is, we are supposed to realize, the very point of departure for modern life. It culminates with the experience of the Phenomenology being the book you needed in particular and the book that we needed in general, and not just another book of philosophy.

Adorno, like Hegel and Kant, addressed himself to the limits of thought, the bounds beyond which we cannot go since to go beyond them is to stop making sense at all. However, Adorno also thought, following a line of thought that flowers in Hegel and Marx, that what seem to be limits of thought can turn out in historical circumstances merely to be limitations that can be overcome with changed social and political circumstances. This is the core of Adorno's theory of “non‐identity.” This in turn requires him as he recognizes to take on all the Hegelian criticisms of such a view and to show how the negative dialectic not only escapes them but offers a new paradigm of dialectical thought.