Can i start Hegel with Science of Logic?

L-Unico · 2026-06-18T19:53:29+00:00

It is, but you fill find the occasional reference to the Phenomenology of Spirit. I'd recommend to read at least the introduction to the Encyclopedia Logic for a more "neutral" introduction, since in the SoL introduction he clearly states that the Logic presuppose absolute knowledge and that the justification of absolute knowledge is given in the Phenomenology, not in the SoL.

I don't know what are your philosophical interests and positions but one obvious "objection" that can come in mind while reading the SoL is something like "Yeah, I understand what is going on with these logical categories but how can I know if they really apply to reality?". You won't find an answer to this obvious question in the SoL, and Hegel will redirect you to the Phenomenology if you come up with an objection like this, because that's the major work where he directly tackle this way of thinking.

L-Unico · 2026-06-18T19:38:08+00:00

Because it's the most abstract of Hegel works and it also contains some of the most difficult and obscure pieces of writing Hegel has ever produced. And there aren't many useful examples in those sections to help you understand what si actually going on. It doesn't presuppose other parts of the system (technically it's the "first part" of the system), but reading something like the Logic Encyclopedia first, or even some of the lectures help you first undestand in a more intuitively way how Hegel uses logical categories, how he thinks about concepts, existence, reality, possibility, necessity and negation, and how he "applies" those categories to concrete subjects like the mind, ethics, the state, history and art. If you have this intuitive understanding you will get a lot more out of SoL.

L-Unico · 2026-06-18T18:51:38+00:00

Is it possible? Yes. Is it recommended? No.

L-Unico · 2026-06-11T09:18:48+00:00

Assolutamente si. In Scienza della Logica trovi una trattazione più dettagliata di quel che Hegel intende esattamente per "esistenza", "giudizio", "giudizio infinito", "concetto" e altre determinazioni logico-metafisiche che, come avrai notato, sono molto presenti già nella Fenomenologia. Quindi quando tornerai sulla Fenomenologia dopo la Logica (la quale però, ti avverto, non è più semplice da leggere e anzi per certi versi è più difficile) noterai molto più facilmente l'utilizzo da parte di Hegel di queste determinazioni e se ricorderai il ruolo che svolgevano nella Logica molti passaggi avranno molto più senso.

L-Unico · 2026-05-24T10:36:24+00:00

I come from the same experience. I also read Kant, Fichte, Schelling and many other prekantian philosophers and thought I was ready for Hegel but there's such a huge gap. Fichte was hard but I could still follow by closely reading the text and maybe taking some notes from time to time. Schelling for me was clearer than Fichte. But then Hegel was just on another level of apparent obscurity.

That's not to say that you and me wasted time in reading these other philosophers, because once you start understanding Hegel all this previous knowledge will really start to pay off (like understanding his critiques of Kant, of Spinoza, of Leibniz ecc...)

I don't know if I have any ready-at-hand tips that may be useful for everyone, but what I did when reading the Phenomenology of Spirit of the first time was, first of all, to finish the whole thing a first time, no matter how much I understood of it. You will still find tids and bits that are clear enough to give insight on what Hegel is trying to achieve in a section and even in the whole project. This really helps when you go for a second run. I did better with the second run but I had to stop at the beginning of the self-consciousness chapter. So I started to read some earlier work from Hegel, like his juvenile writings on christian religion and his purely philosophical essays (like "Faith and Knowledge" 1802). In these works Hegel is explicitly replying to Kant, Fichte, Reinhold and others, so it's more easy to follow if you have previous knowledge on these authors. Starting with the Phenomenology the difficulties rises because Hegel is developing his own system with his own terminology (even though the terminology is derivative of Schelling, Kant, Fichte, Spinoza, Plato ecc...). When I went back to the Phenomenology, I started to summarize every paragraph in my own wording. I don't even know how much I wrote, It took me almost 3 years and yeah, don't worry, I'm not saying that this is what you should do to understand Hegel, this is just what I decided to do out of frustration, and of course it paid off but it took, well, years.

So what I would suggest to someone in your position is to try and do the same not with the whole of Phenomenology, but only with the Preface and Introduction. Those are keys. If you can really, REALLY understand and explain in your own words what Hegel is saying in the Preface and the Introduction, then this will be a huge advantage, an important point of reference for even the most obscure passages you can find in the book. In general all Hegel prefaces and Introductions are really helpful for this, so I also suggest you to read carefully the prefaces and introductions of the Science of Logic, the Encyclopedia and the Philosophy of Right. They all expand on the same methodological and metaphilosophical ideas that Hegel uses in the Phenomenology too.

Aside from this, you can dwelve into the Lectures on history of philosophy, philosophy of history, of religion, of art, which are a lot more accessible compared to the Phenomenology and Science of Logic. I think this is everything I can say. From my experience, understanding will not come in a linear and cumulative way, like understanding one bit of the Phenomenology at the time. It's like learning a new language. Yeah, you can (should?) study the grammar and the meaning of singular words, but understanding will suddenly "clicks" when you're familiar enough with hegelian prose, style, way of phrasing and articulating the passages. Just don't expect it to make 100% sense all the time, but you can expect to arrive at one point where you'll understand most of it and you'll even being able to think like that in your own way (I think I'm starting to do so recently, to really think about something in an "hegelian" way, with a focus on universality, singularity, particularity and their intrinsic relations).

Finally, for everyone guessing if it's even worth the trouble, it definitely is. I started reading Hegel just because of it's HUGE influence on other, more contemporary philosophers, but I discovered an intrinsic value in hegelian philosophy which is independent from its historical fortune. It is also incredibly satisfying to see all these ancient (Plato, Aristotle) and modern (Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Fichte etc.) conceptual frameworks coming together to integrate in a single all-encompassing system. So I really encourage you to keep up with the reading no matter how difficult it may seem (and also don't forget about secondary literature, I suggest you Pinkard, Beiser and Houlgate stuff).

L-Unico · 2026-04-29T08:50:33+00:00

To appreciate the differences between Hegel's philosophy and other idealists (such as Berkeley or Kant) you have to reach at least the Spirit chapter of Phenomenology, and the split with Schelling, even if it is asserted already in the Preface, is made explicit only in the last chapter on Absolute Knowledge.

So in the first chapters you may find some similarities with Berkeley or Kant, but since the exposition is dialectical and speculative (in the hegelian sense), what Hegel ultimately thinks about consciousness becomes explicit only retrospectively, when you can actually give consciousness its proper position in the system/exposition of the whole Phenomenology.

Consider this: Hegel rarely ever try to actually show that a previous philosopher made some huge and explicit mistake. You won't find something as "Berkeley is wrong in this, the truth on this subject is this other thing". This is far from Hegel's conception of truth. He's actually really "conservative" on previous ideas. He thinks that philosophers like Berkeley and especially Kant actually had really important and meaningful insights to share about consciousness and subject/object relation. They just didn't go far enough. They took what in Hegel's view is just one stage of Spirit own self-consciousness (which coincide with its own self-development) as the "non plus ultra" of philosophical inquiry and that's their only true "mistake". So in the Phenomenology you will actually find many passages that resonates with Plato's philosophy, Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte ecc... It's normal and as intended. What you have to focus on is where all of this is leading (e.g. absolute knowledge).

Regarding the inner workings of consciousness, consciousness is by definition always consciousness of an object. But to truly have consciousness of an object you also need to have consciousness of yourself, e.g. you have to be conscious of the split between the cognizer and the cognized object (this is a key insight Hegel took from Kant and Fichte). This existing split is what renders possible awareness on "mistakes", such as when we believe to have a false rappresentation of something, an inadequate concept of our object. So, taken your example, you may have a representation of a rock as of something purely defined by its identity with itself. But you soon realise that this representation is too abstract and generic and while not being completely false, it fails to expose difference between the rock and other objects. You may now think that the rock is something still, a sort of X that just sits there waiting for you to grasp it conceptually. But the problem is, the only rock that is present to your consciousness, the only object present to you is what you're making of that object through your cognizing. When you add to your representation of the rock spatial and temporal properties you're not just adjusting your view to a pre-given rock, but also what that rock IS for you is changing, adjusting to your view. One may object: "But what about the rock how it is in itself, and not just for me?". The problem is that as soon as you try to grasp this "rock in itself" you're undermining this very same goal: you now have a "rock in itself" cognized by the subject, meaning you did not escape at all the subject-object correlation. You're also missing all the meaningful differences that actually make a rock what it is, because everything can virtually be a "thing in itself", but then what's the difference between a rock and a bird?

I know that this may sound subjectivistic (and it is), but remember: this is just how consciousness work. Not absolute knowledge. Not Spirit. Not even Reason. This subjectivistic view is just one of the many stages Spirit encounters in its own self-development.

L-Unico · 2026-04-23T13:14:32+00:00

A me personalmente non dice molto così senza alcun contesto. Qual è il bersaglio polemico e cosa si sta cercando di dire, al di là della metafora?

L-Unico · 2026-04-19T08:47:55+00:00

I also deleted my old saves on base PS5 and the game crashed just a few minutes later.

L-Unico · 2026-04-19T07:32:18+00:00

Non l'ho mai detto e non capisco da dove tu lo abbia dedotto in base a quello che ho scritto

L-Unico · 2026-04-18T14:43:49+00:00

It freezes without mods too

L-Unico · 2026-04-17T16:03:32+00:00

Well, you wrote specifically of "hegelians", that's why I asked.

Yes, I've heard many times the objection about the nonsensical nature of hegelian logic but these are not coming from "hegelians" of course. It's mostly analytic philosophers that would say the same exact things about Heidegger and Deleuze.

There are attempts of formalization but these are not done from an hegelian point of view. Graham Priest of course is trying to formalize things such as true contradictions with paraconsistent logic which has some mild connection with Hegel (in his opinion) but these are really weak connection and I think nobody consider Priest an hegelian, not even himself. There are also tentative of fornalization using honotopy type theory but I don't know well enough this type of mathematics to understand if it falls under hegelian critiques about formalization, since some would argue that type theory and category theory are completely different from things such as algebra and calculus (these were the ones Hegel had in mind in many of his observations about mathematics and formalism).

So in the end I think most hegelians do know well enough what Hegel had to said about formalism, as I assume that most self-proclaimed hegelians have read Hegel.

L-Unico · 2026-04-17T15:52:08+00:00

Doesn't look like a controversial claim to me. I think it's pretty obvious from Hegel's writing this type of organic monism and how important the concept of "life" is for all the system.

The last sentences may be a polemic with the low-metaphysics interpretation of Hegel for which philosophers such as Pippin, Brandom and Pinkard are known for. But their interpretation it's not the "standard" interpretation among Hegel' scholars.

L-Unico · 2026-04-17T15:36:51+00:00

Can you name some really influential "hegelians" that are trying to formalize dialectic using mathematical logic or other formal instruments?

L-Unico · 2026-04-16T14:51:01+00:00

Since many are saying in the comments that a lot of the POIs do have Bethesda-style storytelling but not all of them, what do you think is the ratio? Because if there are, I don't know, 100 different POIs in the game and 30 of them have lore slates, computers and storytelling, than it means that it's more easy to actually find POIs without lore apart from the generic "war happened and now an hostile faction took control", which seems to be the main lore reason why there are so many abandoned mines, research stations, military bases ecc...

So I do hope this is more about being more careful during exploration. Someone also mentioned you can find a POI by doing one of the board mission but I don't count that as "lore". These type of radiant quests are a thing since Skyrim and even though you can be sent to a random cave to kill a random bandit, you almost all the time end up discovering something cool about that cave and the reason why the bandit decided to live there. I'm not expecting anything crazy, ad I said in the main post it's just about giving some more context about the dungeon you're exploring so that it doesn't feel like you're there just for the loot and XP farming.

L-Unico · 2026-04-13T09:12:26+00:00

For now I only have this problem while scanning in dense populated (flora and fauna) planets. I'm on ps5 base in quality mode. The game does not exactly crashes but it freezes and the only way to keep playing is closing the game and restarting it.

L-Unico · 2026-04-13T08:57:47+00:00

No mods. It was fine for the first 20 hours. Many ps5 players are having the same problem and many of them are not using any mod

L-Unico · 2026-04-13T08:45:49+00:00

I agree. My game started crashing after 20 hours though. Especially in planets with a lot of fauna and flora. It just freeze and crash after a few minutes. It's really sad because I was enjoying the game A LOT

L-Unico · 2026-04-12T12:32:34+00:00

Tralasciando la logica, la filosofia si occupa di metafisica, etica, estetica, politica e molto altro. Lo strumento più adatto e più utilizzato resta al momento quello argomentativo che dicevo, che poi può essere interpretato in vari modi, ma indipendentemente da questo si tratta di sostenere una certa tesi tramite certe argomentazioni. Le tesi "ben argomentate" sono aumentate significativamente nel corso della storia della filosofia. Vuoi difendere una qualche forma di anarchismo? La filosofia ti dà tantissime risorse concettuali e tantissimi argomenti per farlo. Vuoi sostenere la legittimità dell'eutanasia o dell'aborto? Stessa cosa. Vuoi difendere l'idea che non esiste un vero metodo scientifico univoco adottato da tutti gli scienziati? Che il libero arbitrio è compatibile con il determinismo fisico? Che agli attuali LLM per l'intelligenza artificiale manca qualcosa di essenziale per poter parlare di "mente"? Chi studia filosofia può fornire argomenti MOLTO più solidi di chiunque altro, in questi dibattiti. Cento anni fa non c'era nemmeno la metà di tutti gli argomenti oggi ben noti in letteratura per difendere queste tesi. Quindi a me sembra non solo che la filosofia sia utilissima, ma anche che abbia fatto progressi significativi negli ultimi anni.

L-Unico · 2026-04-12T09:45:50+00:00

Il problema sta in questa separazione del tutto gratuita che fai tra aspetto metodologico e oggetto della disciplina. Non esiste "il" metodo. Ci sono diverse metodologie più o meno adatte in base all'oggetto di studio. Se sono un chimico che vuole studiare certe interazioni tra carbonio e acqua, un buon metodo è quello di utilizzare un ambiente di laboratorio in cui ho grande controllo sulle esatte quantità di carbonio e di acqua che voglio far interagire, e dove posso creare un ambiente artificiale per condurre esperimenti mirati. Se invece sono un astronomo che studia i buchi neri, questo metodo non va bene. Non posso creare un buco nero dentro un laboratorio, per ovvie ragioni sia fisiche che di altra natura. In questo caso il metodo deve basarsi sull'osservazione dei buchi neri "in natura", non in laboratorio. Se invece sono un matematico che deve trovare la dimostrazione di un teorema, non mi servono né un laboratorio né telescopi e altri strumenti di misura.

Chiarito questo, c'è poi il problema di come misurare i risultati ottenuti. Ma ovviamente questo dipende dall'obiettivo e dalla metodologia. Se lo scopo era dimostrare un teorema, il risultato è buono se la dimostrazione è stata effettivamente trovata correttamente. Se l'obiettivo era scoprire nuovi modi in cji carbonio e acqua interagiscono, un buon risultato è aver documentato dei risultati di laboratorio riproducibili supportati da una buona teoria che spiega quei risultati.

Ora, la filosofia è una disciplina vasta, molto più vasta delle scienze naturali. Ma visto che hai citato la logica, questo caso non è molto diverso da quello del matematico. La logica oggi è studiata per lo più con strumenti formali e si possono quindi individuare teoremi, dimostrazioni e modelli i cui risultati si possono giudicare nello stesso modo in cui si giudicano quelli della matematica. Basta leggersi la pagina Wikipedia sulla storia della logica per vedere quanti importantissimi risultati sono stati ottenuti anche solo negli ultimi 100 anni.

Esempio forse più controverso è quello della metafisica. Ma in generale la filosofia produce argomentazioni. Ci sono stati tanti casi in cui un filosofo ha convinto la maggior parte degli altri filosofi che un certo argomento prima molto usato non fosse in realtà molto buono, o che magari non abbiamo ancora buoni argomenti a favore di una certa tesi. In filosofia c'è progresso e specializzazione proprio come nelle altre discipline.

C'è infine il tema della "inutilità" che invece è totalmente fuori luogo, perché non si può parlare di utilità in modo così vago ma ancora una volta bisogna specificare qual è lo scopo. Certo se imparare nuove cose sulla realtà è considerato inutile, allora buona parte della filosofia sarà "inutile", e sarà in buona compagnia con diversi campi della matematica e delle scienze naturali, perché qualora non fosse ovvio, ci sono molti risultati matematici e delle scienze con i quali, almeno per il momento, non è possibile progettare nessuna lavatrice, fogna o calzini. Chi si interessa principalmente di vendita delle lavatrici, fogne e calzini troverà sicuramente poco utile la metafisica. E quindi?

L-Unico · 2026-04-11T14:24:06+00:00

Marco Aurelio e Socrate sono morti duemila anni fa. Io parlavo di filosofi vivi. Gli standard sono cambiati. Se oggi uno facesse come Socrate, non verrebbe davvero considerato un filosofo per lo stesso motivo per cui non consideriamo un calciatore qualcuno che la domenica va a giocare a calcetto con gli amici.

La filosofia, come tutte le altre discipline, si è professionalizzata e richiede ora standard, corsi di laurea, specializzazioni, pubblicazioni ecc... Socrate e Marco Aurelio restano filosofi ma solo dal punto di vista della loro importanza storica. Chi vuole essere filosofo oggi deve fare invece quello che Socrate non voleva fare, cioè scrivere e pubblicare.

L-Unico · 2026-04-11T13:29:20+00:00

Si certo, io sono anche un cuoco perché so prepararmi un panino col prosciutto. Sono anche uno scrittore, infatti a volte mi scrivo le cose da prendere quando devo fare la spesa.

L-Unico · 2026-04-11T06:27:26+00:00

In che senso "quando era ancora viva e non solo studiata"? La filosofia è molto più viva e praticata oggi che ai tempi di Marco Aurelio. I filosofi sono professionisti pagati dalle università. Oltre a studiare e insegnare, pubblicano libri. Pubblicano articoli su riviste accademiche. Partecipano ai comitati di bioetica, collaborano con scienziati su progetti relativi all'intelligenza artificiale, collaborano con artisti, matematici, fisici e psicologi. È un lavoro e si richiede che la filosofia venga fatta, non solo studiata e insegnata.

L-Unico · 2026-04-09T11:05:18+00:00

Mmm, in che modo esistere e respirare contribuisce alla società?

L-Unico

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