A STUDY OF HEGEL’S LOGIC WARDEN OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXTORD OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1950Oxfard Unroeriity Presi, Aman Hom; LIMES. 4 GLASGOW MEW YORK TOXORTO MELROURNE WELLINOTOW BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS CAYE TOW Genffrey Cumberlege, Publisher to the University PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAINPREFACE To very many modern philosophers modern philosophy seems pretty well sufficient unto itsélf. It could, indeed, surprise no serious historian of philosophy to find an alliance of empiricism and logical analysis indifferent or hostile to most thinkers of the past. Yet there may still be some stu- dents of philosophy, young as well as old, who feel a sense of oppression and sterility when they attempt to labour in the confined atmosphere of modern philosophic thought. They may wonder whether where there are no roots there can be any fruit, To them it may still seem that ‘there is a world else- where’, and that the wider fields in which great thinkers used to range and sow have long enough lain fallow or been but sparsely cropped. They may even Fear that, unless those fields are once again vigorously tilled, not professional philo- sophy only but all civilization is threatened with a very terrifying return of the dark ages. To them, I have thought, a book on Hegel might not come amiss. In that hope I published 4x Introduction to Hegel. A great part of it was historical; the rest was mainly an attempt to explain Hegel’s general conception of logic’as a clue to his system. The present work is designed as a sequel, and I have throughout it presupposed the detail of my Introduction, Chapters II-XVIII contain an outline exposition of Hegel's categories in which the main course of the Excyclo- paedia, Part 1, is slightly modified and supplemented from the Wissenschaft der Logik. 1 have tried to display as clear a thread of thought as I believed I could disentangle from the two versions together, but I have ignored entirely certain sections of the larger Logic where the dialectic is so difficult and so seemingly minute that, even if I were sure I under stood its transitions, I should hesitate to. treat of them in a work which is intended to be of some assistance even on a first reading of Hegel. A comparison of Table I on the one hand with the Table of the Encyclopaedia categories given in Professor Stace’s Philosophy of Hegel,2 and on the other with + Clarendon Press, 1940. > Macmillan, 1923.