Hegel's science of logic in an analytic mode

The concept of the subject, of what Hegel calls absolute negativity, already appears early in the logic of being.1 Absolute negativity, negation of the negation, occurs throughout the logic as identity in difference understood as self-identification under different descriptions. First, the subject refers to itself merely under an incomplete description. Second, it refers to something other than itself under a second description which is logically required by the first. (For example, the description of being in general requires some determinate description of being in particular.) But this second description is dialectically excluded by the assumption that the first description is complete. Third, the subject negates its negation of the other. It discovers itself in the other, under the other description, and thus comes to refer to itself less incompletely. This is Hegel in the analytic mode.

The very concept of analytic Hegelianism may suggest that we have deformed Hegel. Perhaps it would be more honest to call my proposal something else. My reply is that I am maintaining the essential content of Hegelianism even while developing the form further. This content, the content of systematically dialectical speculative philosophy, lies in two essential theses. The first is the thesis of the whole speculative tradition up to and including Schelling: in and through human knowledge of the absolute, the absolute knows itself.2 The second thesis is specifi-cally Hegelian: the absolute comes to know itself concretely by a deductively necessary dialectical thought process realized both in the history of philosophy and in world history.3

My ultimate project is to restate Hegel's dialectical logic in quantification logic. The technical aspects of it will not be my focus here.4 In this paper, I apply linguistic ascent by translating the central Hegelian concept of identity in difference into the Fregean language of identity under different descriptions.5 More particularly, I use Keith Donnel-lan's conc...

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