The brief logic of Herbart[135] is altogether formal too. Logical forms
have for him neither psychological nor metaphysical reference, we are
concerned in logic solely with the systematic clarification of concepts
which are wholly abstract, so that they are not merely not ultimate
realities, but also in no sense actual moments of our concrete thinking.
The first task of logic is to distinguish and group such concepts
according to their marks, and from their classification there naturally
follows their connexion in judgment. It is in the logic of judgment that
Herbart inaugurates a new era. He is not, of course, the first to note
that even categorical judgments do not assert the realization of their
subject. That is a thought which lies very near the surface for formal
logic. He had been preceded too by Maimon in the attempt at a reduction
of the traditional types of judgment. He was, however, the first whose
analysis was sufficiently convincing to exorcise the tyranny of
grammatical forms. The categorical and disjunctive judgment reduce to
the hypothetical. By means of the doctrine of the quantification of the
predicate, in which with his Leibnitzian conception of identity he
anticipated Beneke and Hamilton alike, universal and particular
judgments are made to pull together. Modal, impersonal, existential
judgments are all accounted for. Only the distinction of affirmative and
negative judgments remains unresolved, and the exception is a natural
one from the point of view of a philosophy of pluralism. There was
little left to be done here save in the way of an inevitable _mutatis
mutandis_, even by Lotze and F. H. Bradley. From the judgment viewed as
hypothetical we pass by affirmation of the antecedent or denial of the
consequent to inference. This point of departure is noteworthy, as also
is the treatment of the inductive syllogism as one in which the middle
term is resoluble into a group or series (_Reihe_). In indicating
specifically, too, the case of conclusion from a copulative major
premise with a disjunctive minor, Herbart seems to have suggested the
cue for Sigwart's exposition of Bacon's method of exclusions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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