The Owl of Minerva

Volume 53, Issue 1/2, 2022

The Wasteland and the Ancient City
Historical Materials and the Interpretation of Hegel’s Logic

Although it is a common trope that Hegel’s philosophy marks a seminal shift in the historical orientation of philosophical thought in general, some of the historical problems confronting the reader of the Science of Logic remain relatively neglected. This is not to say that there is any lack of historical work on various dimensions of the Logic. Rather, what remains neglected are the hidden difficulties involved in construing how historical materials contribute to the logical project developed in Hegel’s Science of Logic. These difficulties play an important role in determining the heterogeneous significance of these historical materials, because the role they play in the logical developments is markedly different in different portions of the text being examined. This essay (1) demonstrates that a reader must keep in mind this lack of uniformity when developing a critical interpretation of the Logic, and (2) develops guidelines to facilitate this approach.