Abstract

The view that Hegel’s logic is a metaphysical logic has come under criticism in recent years from a number of commentators. Richard Winfield, for example, states unequivocally in Reason and Justice that Hegel’s “foundation-free theory of determinacy … turns out to be a theory of self-determined determinacy with no immediate ontological or epistemological application … It is no more an ontological theory demonstrating that the fundamental structure of reality is something self-determined, than it is an epistemological doctrine ordaining the manner in which reason can arrive at each and every truth”. The view that Hegel’s is a non-foundational, presuppositionless logic is one that I accept. It is clear that Hegel’s logic does not constitute a traditional metaphysics of the kind put forward by, say, Leibniz or Spinoza. Hegel is not offering us metaphysical propositions about presupposed metaphysical entities. He is not therefore presupposing that there is an absolute and then enquiring into what it is.