Abstract

Hegelian philosophy as a whole is usually considered to be the most developed and completed example of what a philosophical system is. As such, in the epoch beginning in the mid-Nineteenth Century it has come to epitomize precisely what is to be avoided by philosophical activity: to give a world-view, so to speak, an interpretation of how everything hangs together. Such interpretations have broken down into different sciences, both natural and social, which deal with particular realms of objects or events in the world. Thus, what remains as a Hegelian legacy is not his 'system' but rather particular details of it that prove to be fruitful when separated from the system they are embedded in. In this manner, his concept of 'recognition' can be used for social theories, his concept of 'dialectics' for economic theories, and so forth. ;This dissertation attempts to shed some light on the groundwork of the system itself, as it is laid out in the Science of Logic, in order to understand what characterizes Hegel's system. It will put into question the usual interpretation of the Hegelian system as an enclosed totality that has reached its final end at a particular moment in history insofar as it has been fulfilled and includes within it everything that is, i.e., all of actuality. Given the interpretation offered here, Hegel's system becomes one that is constantly in change, in motion, conscious of its own incompleteness and, more importantly, of the impossibility of there being such a state or endpoint. Hegel's system, then, is not the last great attempt at explaining how everything hangs together, but rather the first system to include within itself the blind spot, so to speak, from which an interpretation of the world can be attempted at all. It is the first system that shows the inherently contradictory character of its own claims to totality. ;The main consequence of this work is to show that Hegel's conception of 'system' and totality is precisely what makes him a philosophical figure much closer to Twentieth Century philosophy than to pre-critical philosophy or Eighteenth Century Rationalism. In this sense, Hegel should not epitomize the end of an epoch that is long gone for us. His place---that of his 'system'---lies among us, in the non-systematic philosophical landscape of our times