PHIL 29300 Senior Tutorial
Topic: What is a “Science of Logic” for Hegel? (instructor: T. Evnen)
This course is designed to introduce students to the philosophical aims and method of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Hegel often referred to the Logic as his most important work; by providing Hegel’s account of certain fundamental concepts—his concept of the concept, his account of self-consciousness and pure knowledge, and his idea of “absolute method”—the Logic serves both as a statement of what, for Hegel, philosophy is and, at least in a certain sense, as the ground upon which his philosophical system rests. Unfortunately, however, the Logic also has a strong claim to being Hegel’s most difficult work. We will attempt to ameliorate this difficulty a bit by beginning with an oblique approach to the text that situates it in its philosophical context. Specifically, we will seek to understand the Logic as a response to a determinate set of philosophical concerns that Hegel took himself to find in Kant—an approach to the text that is made possible by the fact that Hegel himself evidently understood the Logic not only as the culminating text of his own philosophical system, but also as the culmination of a philosophical project inaugurated by Kant.In particular, we will develop the relationship between Hegel’s “speculative logic” and Kant’s “transcendental logic” by examining three lines of thought in Kant: 1) Kant’s account of spontaneity (and of the relationship between understanding and sensibility) in the B-Deduction of the First Critique; 2) Kant’s transcendental idealism as it is presented and motivated in certain passages of the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Dialectic; and, 3) Kant’s treatment of the idea of an “intuitive understanding” in §77 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Any one of these topics could rightly be the subject of its own course, but of necessity our concern here will be to focus narrowly on the difficulties and insights that Hegel himself finds in them. (Our narrow focus also means that prior familiarity with Kant’s philosophy will not be presupposed).In the latter half of the course, we will approach the Logic directly. We will orient ourselves by beginning with selections from the introductory materials (as well as a few of the concluding passages) of both the Encyclopedia Logic and the Science of Logic. These are the places in the text that contain Hegel’s most explicit reflections on his philosophical aims and methodology. From there, we will dive into the thick of the text and examine (as “case studies”) Hegel’s treatment of the progression from teleology to life to cognition.
Topic: Logic and Thought (instructor: G. Nir)
How does logic relate to thought? A course in Elementary Logic teaches us formal methods of evaluating arguments, but does it purport to tell us anything about how we actually reason? Through a discussion of central issues in the philosophy of logic, this course will explore ways in which this question may receive a positive answer. We will concern ourselves particularly with the kind of philosophy of mind that logicians like Frege and Wittgenstein took themselves to offer. The course has four parts. We will start by looking at the conception of logic advocated by Frege and Wittgenstein, according to which logic is primarily concerned with thought, its structure, form, uses and laws. In the second part of the course, we will ask whether puzzles which beset formal logic must also plague thought, inasmuch as the later is understood as endowed with logical form. We will then try to capture what is unique in the concern of logic with thought by contrasting it with the kinds of concern that science, in particular psychology, has. Finally, we will look at two other approaches to the relation of logic and thought which differ markedly from the one we developed so far, and contrast their virtues with what we will call the constitutive conception of logic.
Meets with Jr/Sr section. Open only to intensive-track majors. No more than two tutorials may be used to meet program requirements.