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Hegel: A Dialetheist? Truth and Contradiction in Hegel’s Logic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2017

Michela Bordignon
Michela Bordignon*
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo—Università degli Studi di Padova, Italymichelabordignon81@yahoo.it
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Abstract

The article aims to show that Priest wrongly associates Hegel’s dialectic with his dialetheism. Even if Priest correctly argues that the notion of contradiction in Hegel’s logic is a logical one and that contradiction is meant to be true, Hegel goes a long way beyond Priest’s dialetheism insofar as he is not committed to a dialetheist conception of a three truth-values logic. I start my analysis with a brief introductory overview of the dialetheist’s thesis of the truth of contradiction. Then, in the first part of the article, I show that Hegel’s notion of contradiction can be equated with a logical contradiction and that Hegel argues that some contradictions are true. In the second part of the paper I show that Hegel’s thesis of the truth of contradiction is different from Priest’s, because Hegel endorses a developmental conception of truth which allows him to account for complex and dynamic properties of reality in a way that Priest’s does not allow.

Type
Articles
Information
Hegel Bulletin , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , August 2019 , pp. 198 - 214
Copyright
© The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2017 

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