讲座简介

Lecture one

“‘Where shall I begin, please?’ asked the white rabbit. ‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely.” The King’s answer in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland recalls the answer given by the sovereign of modern philosophy, under the heading “With what must the Science begin?” As is well known, the question of the beginning in Hegel’s philosophy is one of the most controversial points in Hegel scholarship – 100 different Hegel researchers will give you a hundred different (sometimes contradictory) answers.

It seems that the logical beginning can thus be taken in two ways, in a mediated or an immediate way. Early on in the section “With What Must the Science Begin?” Hegel emphasises these two paths. Drawing upon the Encyclopedia, Hegel highlights that “there is nothing, nothing in heaven, or in nature or in mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation, so that these two determinations reveal themselves to be unseparated and inseparable and the opposition between them to be a nullity.”

Lecture two

It is regrettable that Hegel’s claim that philosophical knowledge can emerge solely from the concept is not taken seriously enough in Hegel research. We must insist that ‘the whole, like the formation of its parts, is based on the logical spirit’, the claim to philosophical science must include the logical foundation, only this self-determination of the concept and the idea is ‘not about a logic that is commonplace’, but about the Logic of the Concept, a logic characterised by the unity of universality, particularity and singularity. Hegel provides the decisive foundations for a philosophical history of philosophy. Such a new historiography of philosophy in Hegel’s footsteps builds on the combination of the logical sequence of stages of concepts and the temporal sequence of philosophical systems, to form a third, a third architectonics, an ideal-typical-paradigmatic order. 

Spinozistic (or ‘Spinozan’) substantiality forms a classic case for a stage in the framework of a philosophical, ideal-typical-paradigmatic history of philosophy, a striking nodal point. Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, his Encyclopaedia and, in an outstanding and theoretically brilliant way, his Science of Logic provide the historical and logical foundation for conceptualising such a new perspective.