Hegel's Science of Logic Course

• Session 1 — Two Prefaces, Two Moments in Hegel’s Logic

The course opens by reading the two Prefaces Hegel wrote for the Science of Logic, in 1812 and 1832. Written twenty years apart, they offer two snapshots of Hegel’s philosophical development: the first at the beginning of the project, the second near the end of his life.

Reading them together allows us to see how Hegel’s understanding of logic itself matured — moving away from a metaphysics centred on fixed identity toward a logic in which contradiction becomes productive.

• Session 2 — What Is New About Hegel’s Logic?

Before entering the individual categories of the Science of Logic, this session steps back to examine Hegel’s Introduction and the larger philosophical project behind the book.

What distinguishes Hegelian logic from traditional logic? What does it mean for logical determinations to be objective? And why does Hegel believe that logic must move beyond fixed rules of thought toward the self-development of concepts themselves?

The session also introduces an important tension that will accompany the entire course. Hegel is often associated with negativity and contradiction, yet negativity is never the final destination. The movement through the negative is what makes possible the positive determination of the Absolute Idea.

• Session 3 — Determinateness: How Something Becomes What It Is

The first sustained encounter with Hegel’s Doctrine of Being begins with determinateness and quality.

• Session 4 — Magnitude: Quantity, Desire and the Contemporary World

The course turns from quality to quantity.

Alongside a close reading of Hegel’s account of magnitude, the session brings these categories into conversation with contemporary life.

• Session 5 — Measure: Where Quantity Becomes Quality

Measure brings together the two major movements encountered so far: quality and quantity.

This movement also prepares one of the major transitions of the Science of Logic: from Being to Essence. The session asks why immediate being can no longer adequately account for reality — and why thought must begin to investigate the relations and mediations that lie beneath what immediately appears.

• Session 6 — True Infinity: Reflecting on the Doctrine of Being

Led by Dimitry Crooijmans, this open session returns to the Doctrine of Being as a whole.

Particular attention is given to Hegel’s concept of true infinity.

The remainder of the session opens the discussion to participants, creating space to revisit the central problems of Being, Nothing, Becoming, determinateness, quantity, measure and infinity before moving into the Doctrine of Essence.

• Session 7 — Reflection Within: From Being to Essence

The course now enters the Doctrine of Essence.

Working through Shine, The Essentialities and Ground, the session explores how identity, difference, contradiction and ground emerge from this reflective movement — and why Essence requires us to rethink the apparent opposition between what appears and what lies beneath appearance.

• Session 8 — Appearance: When Essence Enters Existence

This session examines Concrete Existence, Appearance and the Essential Relation, following Hegel’s attempt to mediate the relationship between underlying structures and the concrete forms through which they appear.

• Session 9 — Actuality: Possibility, Necessity and the Absolute

The final formal session on the Doctrine of Essence turns to Actuality.

The philosophical stakes are considerable: what does it mean for something to be merely possible, actually existing, or necessary? And how can we understand necessity without reducing reality to a closed and predetermined system?

These questions bring the Doctrine of Essence to its limit and prepare the decisive transition toward the Doctrine of the Concept.

• Session 10 — Reflecting on the Doctrine of Essence

Open session with Dimitry Crooijmans

This open session creates space to return to the Doctrine of Essence as a whole.

Participants revisit reflection, identity, difference, contradiction, ground, appearance and actuality, bringing their own questions and interpretations into the discussion.

The aim is not simply to review what has already been covered, but to test how the different moments of Essence relate to one another — and to clarify the movement that will eventually make the transition to the Concept possible.

• Session 11 — Subjectivity: The Becoming of the Concept

The course now enters Hegel’s Subjective Logic and the Doctrine of the Concept.

Working through The Concept, Judgment and the Syllogism, the session examines a decisive shift in perspective. Thought is no longer primarily investigating objects from the outside; the logical movement increasingly turns toward the activity of conceptual determination itself.

This transition opens questions of interiority and subjective becoming. What does it mean for thought to internalize the movement it has previously encountered in Being and Essence? And how might Hegel’s logic illuminate the difficult process through which a subject becomes capable of thinking its own determinations?

• Session 12 — Objectivity: Mechanism, Chemism and Teleology

After Subjectivity, Hegel turns again toward the object — but the object now appears differently.

The session follows the movement through Mechanism, Chemism and Teleology, three increasingly complex ways of understanding how objects relate to one another.

• Session 13 — The Idea: Life and Cognition

The session examines Hegel’s account of Life and the Idea of Cognition, exploring how individuality, self-relation and relation to an external world become essential to the development of the Idea.

This also returns us to Hegel’s broader conception of the philosophical sciences and raises a provocative question: what kind of relationship between logic, life and knowledge is Hegel ultimately attempting to construct?

• Session 14 — The Absolute Idea: Why the End Is Also a Beginning

The final formal presentation reaches the Absolute Idea, the culmination of the Science of Logic.

Yet Hegel’s conclusion is not simply a final proposition or a point at which thought comes to rest. The end contains the possibility of another beginning — one that would have been impossible without the entire movement that preceded it.

The session therefore asks how the journey from Being through Essence to Concept transforms the meaning of the beginning itself. The Logic closes not by leaving movement behind, but by showing why genuine beginnings emerge only through mediation.

• Session 15 — Reflecting on the Doctrine of the Concept

The final open session returns to the Doctrine of the Concept as a whole.

Participants reflect on subjectivity, objectivity, Life, Cognition and the Absolute Idea, bringing together questions developed throughout the final stage of the course.

• The Dialectics of AI: From Friston to Hegel - Guest lecture with Thomas Hamelryck

How might Hegel’s logic speak to contemporary developments in computation, neuroscience and artificial intelligence?

Thomas Hamelryck introduces concepts from modern statistics, machine learning and the work of Karl Friston, opening possible connections between contemporary theories of cognition and Hegel’s Science of Logic.

Rather than simply claiming that Hegel anticipated artificial intelligence, the session asks a more interesting question: can dialectical logic help us think differently about inference, prediction, cognition and the relation between mind and world?

• Category Theory and Hegel - Guest lecture with William Rupush

This session brings Hegelian logic into conversation with contemporary mathematics.

William Rupush introduces category theory, a mathematical framework concerned less with isolated objects than with the relations and transformations between them.

The discussion explores whether developments in modern mathematics might offer new resources for thinking dialectically — and whether Hegel’s emphasis on relation, mediation and transformation can enter into productive dialogue with mathematical forms that emerged long after his death.

• Sublation, Negativity and the Unconscious - Guest lecture with Alex Ebert

Alex Ebert leads a series of provocations around one of the most familiar — and frequently simplified — concepts associated with Hegel: sublation.

The discussion moves through interiority and exteriority, limit and drive, excess and absence, and the recurring philosophical search for negativity.

From there, the session opens toward questions of the unconscious and cognition: how might limits themselves generate forms of knowing? And what happens if contradiction is understood not merely as something thought encounters, but as something involved in the production of thought itself?

• From Hume to Hegel: The Problem of Common Life - Guest lecture with Daniel Garner

Daniel Garner brings Hegel into conversation with David Hume and the philosophical inheritance of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Rather than treating Hume and Hegel as belonging to fundamentally opposed traditions, the session explores possible affinities between their work and asks how both might help us reconsider the problem of common life.

The discussion addresses concrete experience, autonomous rationality and what Garner describes as the risks of a “barbarism of refinement” — opening a broader question about whether modern philosophy can rediscover forms of rationality rooted in shared life rather than abstraction alone.

• Hegel, Heidegger and Continental Thought - Guest lecture with Thomas Winn

Thomas Winn brings the Science of Logic into conversation with Heidegger and the wider tradition of continental philosophy.

The session explores what happens to Hegelian questions of Being, mediation and the Absolute when they are encountered from within a philosophical tradition that frequently defines itself through a critical relation to Hegel.

Rather than reducing the encounter to a simple opposition between two philosophers, the discussion opens a wider reflection on the different ways twentieth-century continental thought inherits, transforms and contests the problems established by German Idealism.

• From Mediation to Meditation and Back Again - Guest lecture with Layman Pascal

The course concludes its series of contemporary dialogues with Layman Pascal and his work on the Metaphysics of Adjacency.

Bringing Hegel into conversation with Integral Theory and metamodern spirituality, the session explores the relationship between mediation and meditation, philosophical concepts and spiritual practices, and the ways contemporary metaphysics might intersect with dialectical thought.

Rather than treating Hegel as a closed historical system, the session asks what happens when the Science of Logic becomes a resource for philosophical experiments that Hegel himself could never have anticipated.