Science of Logic Paperback – 12 Jan. 2017

Hegel says philosophy is its own time captured in thought. Hegel did not claim that he could see the future. He would have to acknowledge that even His own evolutionary view of the history of philosophy was a reflection of the givens of his time. Maybe Hegel couldn't help but see philosophy in this way given the limits of his time and place.Ideas have a history outside of time. Hegel's logic is an account of how ideas develop into one another but develop independent of time.I find Hegel's Logic fascinating, although I don't understand much about it. To me it is like the seaside that you can smell from a distance without seeing it up close. In the future I would like to see the beach, the pebbles, and swim in Hegel's Logic.

Someone is having a laugh, a very poor kindle version, big chunks missing, contents doesn't work, even if it was free it would be a rip off

Hegel's book remains a forbidding, yet immensely influential piece of work-Lenin read it in 1914-17 to help sharpen his dialectical skills, and it remains of value even now in compelling the reader to think about the notion and essence of being. It is certainly not a light read-the writing style in English translation verges on the impenetrable at times, and Hegel writes in a deliberately abstract manner (though occasionally concrete examples are provided). But if approached methodically, taking notes as you go along, it remains one of the most intellectually rewarding books you could ever possibly read.

Together with "The Phenomenology of Spirit" all of philosophy since Hegel could be said to be an ongoing dialogue with his position and argument. This is central to the work and to understanding Marx as Lenin said, but it is so much more than that.

This review is of AV Miller's translation that appeared in Muirhead's Library of Philosophy in the 1970s. Having read it twice I feel entitled to comment, though many passages remain obscure to me even after considerable effort.This is philosophy in pursuit of the 'Absolute', which is not what is usually meant by logic. The argument proceeds by naive intuition, followed by dialectic, arriving at a richer 'speculative' standpoint which then becomes a new starting point for further argument. The initial starting point is 'pure being', which is the height of abstraction and famously equated with 'pure nothing' (being in general is nothing in particular, so to speak) and said to result in 'becoming' (that includes being and nothing). Some say the real method is a progressive removal of layers of abstraction and the recovery of a common sense world view. However, it is probably more true to say that there is some active development of an intuition in the dialectic, which is not all of the same kind or equal in quality of argument.There are three books, titled Being, Essence and the Concept. The first book discusses ideas of quality, quantity and measure at a very abstract level. I found the second easier going, as Hegel here develops a series of intelligible contrasts, from illusion and seeming through to appearance in a way that contrasts with Kant's absolute contrast of appearance with an unknowable 'thing-in-itself'. The third book recapitulates much of the earlier material in the form of a critique of Aristotelian Logic.The previous Johnson & Struthers translation is often clearer, as Millar is infelicitous and literal in many places (e.g. 'negative positing' where the original has 'setzen' for positing and thus is not so paradoxical, the idea being of defining by exclusion). There is a very recent new translation by di Giovanni, but in any version you can expect to struggle with both the thought and the language. If you want something easier by Hegel, I'd try the much shorter Encyclopedia Logic or the more concrete and dramatic Phenomenology. Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom and God is a recent commentary on Hegel's Logic by Dr Robert M Wallace, sometime contributor to the Hegel-yahoo lists where there are free discussions of the text.

This book is the most interesting adquisition I've made...now, I'll try to understand it, cause you know, it is Hegel

Missing large chunks of the text. If I had wanted a reduced version I'd have just bought the Encyclopaedia Logic.

Fantastic book, awful version. A fair few errors in spelling throughout, in addition to entire segments being complete skipped over - mostly Hegel's remarks, such as on the Kantian Construction of Matter from the forces of attraction and repulsion.The spelling errors don't get in the way of reading too much, and you can find the remarks in the PDF copy of the Cambridge version online - so if this version of the book is your only option, then it's definitely still worth getting.