Abstract
IT is curious that a book which professed only to be a study of Hegel, and deals with criticisms of the Hegelian method and principle current more than thirty years ago, should be reprinted to-day and present the same freshness and vigour to the reader now as it did then. This is the feeling with which one who read Dr. McTaggart's Hook on its first appearance now lays it down, having read it again from beginning to end. It contains the best exposition of the dialectic, and the best defence of the dialectic, and the best criticism of it by any living writer. The conclusion Dr. McTaggart reaches would be accepted probably even by the most convinced Hegelians, namely, the conclusion that the logic is of permanent value and the dialectic sound, but that the metaphysic is unsatisfactory and cannot be final. His own view would seem to be that the ultimate reality is a unity of personalities, but that this unity is not itself a personality. Most of this book was originally presented in papers read and discussed at the Aristotelian Society in the early 'nineties and published in Mind, for at that time the Society did not publish Proceedings. It is a living work to-day because, more than at any previous time, the problem of the methodology of science is in the forefront. Mathematical discoveries, which have caused a revolution in our mode of conceiving the physical universe, and the discoveries of the new psychology, which have profoundly changed our mode of conceiving the mind, have necessitated a reconsideration of what is implied in the experimental method. We have found a need for dialectic, for the logic of philosophy. The stone which was set at nought by the scientific builders of the nineteenth century is become the head of the corner.
Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic.
By Dr. John McT. E. McTaggart Second edition. Pp. xvi + 255. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1922.) 15s. net.
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CARR, H. Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic . Nature 110, 208 (1922). https://doi.org/10.1038/110208a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/110208a0