Logic as the Science of the Pure ConceptCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept
Croce, Benedetto
Logic
One of the errors which in our opinion vitiates the writing of the
history of philosophy, appears to be just the prejudice in favour of a
treatment of the general part of this history, in which, for instance,
speculations concerning practice enter only incidentally, a great
part of logical doctrine is excluded as not belonging to it, and the
doctrines of Æsthetic are hardly referred to at all. The prejudice is
derived, in the last analysis, from the old idea of an Ontology or
Metaphysic, as the science of an ideal world, of which nature and man
are the more or less imperfect actualizations; hence the relegation of
a great part of true and proper philosophy to what is called the human
and natural world, and the looking upon this as a special philosophy,
distinguished from general philosophy and consequently lying outside
the true and proper history of philosophy. That prejudice, amounting
almost to a survival, persists even in those who have more or less
surpassed such a conception, and determines the curious configuration
of a general history of philosophy, outside the special histories.
Such a scheme, when closely examined, shows itself to be a complex of
historical elucidations of some problems of Logic, and of some of the
philosophy of the practical (individuality, liberty, the supreme good,
etc.), and of some arising from their relations (knowing and being,
spirit and nature, infinite and finite, etc.). These are all without
doubt arguments of philosophical history; but they must be united with
the others, from which they have been wrenched, and without which they
prove but little intelligible. Philosophy is present in the Poetics
and the Rhetoric of Aristotle as much as in the Metaphysics; not less
in the _Critique of Pure Judgment_ of Kant, than in the _Critique of
Pure Reason._ It is never outside those treatises concerning what are
called the special parts of philosophy. The present-day historians
of philosophy who have overcome so many forms of transcendence
and re-established immanence, must also overcome the residue of
transcendence, which, so to speak, they still retain in their own house.
[Sidenote: _Histories of particular philosophies and literary value of
such division._]
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