Logic
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Logic

Immanuel Kant

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eBook - ePub

Logic

Immanuel Kant

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About This Book

The second, corrected edition of the first and only complete English translation of Kant's highly influential introduction to philosophy, presenting both the terminological and structural basis for his philosophical system, and offering an invaluable key to his main works, particularly the three Critiques. Extensive editiorial apparatus.

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Year
2012
ISBN
9780486117430
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Immanuel Kant’s LOGIC

A Manual for Lectures

Gr. Excellenz
bem
Serrn

Serrn Cherhard Julius
C. bon Maffom,

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nigl. Preuff. Geheimen Gtaats: und Juftizminifter, Chef des geifilichen Departements in esangelifch: lutherifchen Rir: chen: und Schul:, auch allen Gtifis. und Rl
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fter:, ingelei: chen fatholifchen Geifilichfeitb: Sachen, Frftem PrĂĄfident des evangelifch: lutherifchen Ober: Confiftorii, Ober: Curator der UniverfitĂĄten ic. ic.



ehrfuchtsboll gemibmet


rom
Herausgeber
Gottlob Benjamin JĂĄfdje,
Doctor und Privatvocent anf Der UniderfitĂĄt in Ronigsberg,
ivitgiicbe ber gelebrten Befeufhaft du Franifurt
au ber Ober.
To His Excellency
the Right Honorable
Eberhard Julius E. von Massow,
Royal Prussian Privy Counsellor and Minister of Justice, Head of the Spiritual Department for Evangelical Lutheran Church, School, also all Convent and Cloister Affairs, likewise for Catholic Spiritual Affairs, First President of the Evangelical Lutheran High Consistory, Chief Curator of Universities, etc., etc.,
respectfully dedicated
by the editor
Gottlob Benjamin JĂ€sche
Doctor and Faculty Lecturer at the University of Königsberg, Member of the Learned Society at Frankfort on the Oder.

Preface

It is already a year and a half since Kant instructed me to edit his Logic for the press as presented by him in public lectures to his listeners, and to submit it to the public in the form of a compendious manual. To that end I received from him the very manuscript he had used in his lectures, with an expression of the special honorable confidence in me that I, familiar with the principles of his system generally, would readily enter into the course of his ideas; and that I would not distort or falsify his thoughts but exhibit them with the requisite clarity and definiteness and at the same time in the appropriate order. In undertaking the honorable assignment and trying, as best I could, to carry it out in accordance with the wish and expectation of the celebrated wise man, my much revered teacher and friend, everything concerning the presentation—the style and execution, the exhibition and arrangement of the thoughts—must thus be charged in part to my account. It therefore also falls naturally to me to render account thereof to the reader of this new Kantian work. On this point a few explanations are in order.
Since 1765, without interruption, Professor Kant had based his lectures on logic on Meier’s textbook as a guide (Georg Friedrich Meier’s Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, Halle, at Gebauer, 1752), for reasons which he had explained in a program announcing his lectures in 1765. The copy of said compendium of which he availed himself in his lectures, like all other textbooks used by him for the same purpose is interleaved with sheets of paper; his general notes and explanations as well as the more special ones that stand in close relation to the text of individual paragraphs may be found partly on these sheets, partly on the margins of the book itself. And these handwritten records of scattered notes and explanations now make up the store of materials which Kant assembled for his lectures and from time to time expanded by new ideas, revising and improving it again and again in respect of various particular matters. It thus contains at least the essentials of everything the famous commentator of Meier’s textbook used to communicate to his listeners in his freely delivered lectures on logic, and considered worth writing down.
As concerns the presentation and arrangement of matters in this work, I believed that I would carry out the ideas and principles of the great man most accurately, if, in respect to the economy and division of the whole generally, I kept to his express explanation. Accordingly there must be included, in the actual treatise of logic and especially of the doctrine of elements, nothing but the theory of the three essential main functions of thinking—concepts, judgments, and conclusions.234 Anything dealing with cognition in general and its logical perfections, which in Meier’s textbook precedes the doctrine of concepts and occupies almost one half of the whole, must therefore be assigned to the Introduction. As Kant remarks right at the beginning of the eighth section in which Meier presents the doctrine of concepts: “So far cognition in general has been dealt with, as the propaedeutic of logic; now follows logic itself.”
As a result of this express indication I have taken into the Introduction everything up to the said section. The Introduction, for that reason, has gained much greater length than it usually occupies in manuals of logic. Another consequence of this has been that the Doctrine of Method, the second main part of the treatise, had to turn out the shorter, the greater the amount of material that had already been treated in the Introduction, as, e.g., the doctrine of proof, and the like—which incidentally by our modern logicians is now rightly considered as belonging to the field of the doctrine of method. It would have been a repetition as unnecessary as improper to mention these matters once more in their right spot, only to make the incomplete complete and to put everything in its proper place. The latter, however, has nevertheless been done by me in respect to the doctrine of definition and the logical division of concepts, which in Meier’s compendium is treated as early as the eighth section, namely, the doctrine of elements regarding concepts, an order which Kant also left unchanged in his presentation.
It probably goes without saying that the great reformer of philosophy and—regarding the economy and external form of logic—also of this special part of theoretical philosophy would have worked out a logic after his architectonic design, whose essential outline is recorded in the Critique of Pure Reason, if it had so pleased him. His task of a scientific foundation of the entire system of philosophy proper—the philosophy of what is realiter true and certain—that incomparably more important and more difficult task, which only he alone could carry out in his originality, did not permit him to think of working out a logic by his own hand. He could, however, very well leave this work to others who with insight and unbiased judgment could use his architectonic ideas for a truly well adapted and well ordered treatment of that science. This was to be expected of several thorough and unbiased thinkers among our German philosophers, and this expectation has indeed not disappointed Kant and the friends of his philosophy. In economy and disposition of the whole, several new textbooks on logic must be regarded as a fruit of those Kantian ideas on logic. For the conviction must enter everyone through even the most superficial comparison of the old with the new textbooks of logic treated after Kantian principles—if only he has correct and clear concepts of the peculiar character and lawful limits of logic—that this science has really gained thereby, though it is true that it has become neither richer, nor more solid in content or better grounded in itself. But it has become more purified, partly of all foreign matter, partly of many useless subtleties and mere dialectical trifles; it has become more systematic and yet, with all scientific rigorousness of method, at the same time simpler. For, much as some old manuals of this science have won distinction by scientific strictness of method, clarity, definiteness and precision in explanations, and conclusiveness and evidence of proofs, there is hardly one among them in which the boundaries of various domains belonging to general logic in its wider extension, of the merely propaedeutic, the dogmatic and technical, the pure and empirical, do not run into and across one another in such a manner as to make it impossible to distinguish one from the other.
Herr Jacob, in the Preface to the first edition of his logic, remarks: “Wolff has excellently grasped the idea of a general logic, and if this great man had embarked on an entirely separate presentation of pure logic, he would have furnished us, due to his systematic mind, with a masterpiece that would have made all future work of this kind superfluous.” But he just did not carry out this idea and none of his successors has carried it out, great and well-founded as, by the way, the merit is that the Wolffian school has acquired concerning the properly logical, the formal perfection in philosophical cognition.
But apart from what still could and had to be done to perfect logic in respect of external form by the necessary separation of pure and merely formal propositions from real or metaphysical propositions, when the adjudication and determination of the inner content of this science, as a science, is at issue, Kant’s judgment on this point is not in doubt. Several times he has expressed himself definitively and explicitly: logic is to be regarded as a separate, self-contained science grounded in itself, and from its origin and first development, beginning with Aristotle up to our times, it has not been able to gain anything in scientific grounding. According to this assertion, Kant thought neither of grounding the logical principles of identity and contradiction in a higher principle, nor of deducing the logical forms of judgments. He has recognized and treated the principle of contradiction as a self-evident premise not in need of any derivation from a higher principle. Only the use, the validity of this principle, was restricted by him, in expelling it from the domain of metaphysics where dogmatism ...

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