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Klaus Hartmann reads Hegel's philosophy as a non-metaphysical theory of categories that combines classical ontology's concern with conceptualizing determinations of being qua being, and modern philosophy's concern with explaining why such conceptualizations must be accepted by the subject as true. Accordingly, the Science of Logic presents a successful transcendental argument for those categories in virtue of which thought accounts for being's explanability in the course of accounting for itself as explanatory (cf. [12], pp. 3f.).¹ His philosophy of the real presents a similar transcendental argument, justifying more concrete categories as principiata of the Logic's categories (cf. [13], p. 277). Such a reading navigates the Charybdis of making Hegel's system inextricably depend upon an indemonstrable metaphysics of absolute idealism, and the Scylla of divorcing particular critical insights from their own systematic place in Hegel's system. On this reading, the dialectic provides the principle in terms of which the categories are supposed to be justified, and the cogency of the justification requires that it be independent of any metaphysical claims.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-8378-7_6

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