Being, Nothing, Becoming. Hegel and Us – A Formalization

Abstract

Despite its great speculative relevance and despite the fact that it is the very foundation of the Hegelian system, The Science of Logic by G. W. F. Hegel is practically an illegible book nowadays. Even for Germans it is a difficult reading. Other books by Hegel (except for the Encyclopedia) are reasonably readable. This is not the case of The Science of Logic. Almost all technical terms used by Hegel are defined by a conceptual network, in which the components are themselves related to one another. That is the reason for the difficulty of finding a reading guide to direct the reader from one chapter to the next. Initially, the authors of the present paper try to translate Hegel’s typical language into usual English, even if some of the richness of the original text is lost. In a second step, they attempt to formalize what has been translated. There is no intention of keeping fidelity to Hegelian orthodoxy; on the contrary, the authors attempt to correct everything they think is an error in the Hegelian system.

Key words: dialectics, Hegel, formalization.