Abstract

In this revision of his doctoral dissertation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Menahem Rosen aims to furnish the conception of dialectic which underlies Hegel’s logical-scientific thought with the contemporary intelligibility which he considers it to lack. Six topics define the chapters of this ambitious reconstruction of dialectic as “basically a logic of ambiguity and paradox” : identity, difference, and contradiction; the beginning of philosophy; its end; matter and nature; language; and dialectical explanation. Specifically, Rosen aims “to prune” the Wissenschaft der Logik and so win “Hegel the dialectician” for the analysis of “human reality qua social, cultural and historical reality,” in distinction from “natural reality qua physical, chemical or biological reality,” by exhibiting the incompatibility of “Hegel the ‘spiritual monist’” with the dualism which actually informs his own method and prevents its totalization. Speculative logic may provide the guidelines of a revised theory of subjectivity, but it does not deliver a metaphysics of the absolute, either as the final unity of thinking and being or even as that of thinking itself. If it is initially unclear exactly what is meant by the declaration that as Hegel’s successors “we are in a privileged position to add to his work, without showing thereby any genuine wisdom”, the issue becomes somewhat more certain through the assurance that “in the face of principles, reality is always right, even at the price of a certain lack of coherence”. The justification of objective reality before the principles of thought is supposed to follow from the inevitable disruption of conceptual order by its ineradicable empirical element.