"Hegel on Life as a Logical Concept"
Abstract: The question at issue is the status of the difference between living and nonliving beings, an issue that gained in importance in the late eighteenth century when Kant, in his Critique of Judgment (1790), in effect admitted that his earlier critical philosophy had not “grounded” such a distinction as a pure or categorical distinction, knowable as such a priori, and that this omission was unacceptable. But for Hegel, in his Science of Logic (1812-1816), Kant’s attempt to argue for some sort of “objective” status to the distinction, and so to teleological judgments, failed. Hegel’s analysis of this failure and his own attempt to justify the non-empirical and objective status of the distinction are the topics discussed in this paper.
Robert B. Pippin is a Professor at the University of Chicago.
