Andy said:
>The point is that every syllogism contains a moment of truth. Some of the
>syllogisms that Hegel "refutes" are patently absurd, when presented as
>they are in purely logical terms, but still contain a moment of truth,
>but, as you say, they miss the Notion and are overcome in the development
>of the Notion. Hegel claims that his logical presentation reveals the
>movement of Spirit. In non-metaphysical terms, Notions concretise
>themselves in their development in culture and history in this way. This
>can be seen as the relative truth of various "maxims", as the development
>of specific social relations, and the deepening of the idea itself.
This passage has me thinking of a syllogism as containing a moment of
truth, and a maxim as containing some relative truth - but both are just
steps toward the development of a deeper and fuller idea of the truth.
This in turn has me thinking of the truth as something in perpetual
development - the idea that truth is something in constant motion (the
"movement of Spirit" in Hegel's system) that can be captured only
incompletely when using the inadequate (incomplete) methods of formal
logic. I get from your explanations that Hegel scrutinizes key elements of
formal logic - the identification and analysis of aspects (individuality,
particularity, and universality), the making of judgments about their
relations (U/I, I/P, U/P etc.), the use of syllogisms describing their
possible mediations (I-U-P, U-P-I) etc., and the creation of maxims derived
from these methods - and then concludes that the truth in the hands of
these methods of formal logic can capture the truth only for moments. In
this way, Hegel points to the larger task of applying much more than just
formal logic to understanding the truth.
Am I heading in the right direction?
- Steve
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Nov 01 2003 - 01:00:08 PST