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In the past decades, philosophical interest in Hegel has seen a resurgence in both
continental and analytic circles. What has marked this veritable renaissance, however,
has been a noteworthy neglect of Hegel's second major work, The Science of Logic.
In one respect, this is surprisingthe Logic is the self-professed centrepiece of Hegel's
system; no comprehension of his thinking can thus occur in its absence. In another, it is
very understandable: if the Logic deals, as Hegel himself says, with the concept of God
before creation, it would seem prima facie difcult if not impossible to make such a
project palatable to current mainstream philosophical commitments.
Rosen's book is not only an admirable achievement insofar as it presents us with
a complete commentary on Hegel's often ignored groundwork, which counts amongst
the hardest texts in the history of philosophy. That there are only a handful of other
books in English that cover its entire trajectory alone makes it an important contribu-
tion. Furthermore, it is laudable because it elevates the Logic to its rightful place with
great audacity, arguing it is those very features that have made so many shy away from
it that prove its value. For Rosen, it is the heart of the system due to its concern with
logos, that is, the underlying structure that renders the world intelligible not merely for
us, but more primordially in itself (49). Its task is to show how being is intrinsically
open to thinking because both are a part of a single formation process, which Hegel
names God (87-88), thus guaranteeing science.
What makes Hegel's Logic so distinctive is its methodology. It justies its worldview
through a presentation of the incoherent conceptual structure of classical and modern
(i.e., pre-Hegelian) ontology (213). While Parmenides fails to elucidate what being
is because, when taken so globally, being is indistinguishable from nothing, Heraclitus
makes an advance by stating that the multiplicity of becoming is the metaphysical
beginning of order. However, this creates the dilemma of how sporadic multiples can
give rise to stable unity. Plato's attempt to hypostatize the unity-multiple relation in
Ideas merely poses the problem as the solution; moreover, divorced from ontology,
thinking amounts to a lifeless activity disconnected from the content of thought