This chapter considers Hegel's treatment of the laws of thought from traditional logic: identity, noncontradiction, excluded middle, even perhaps the principle of sufficient reason (ground). It argues that these laws, which are uncritically presupposed by the tradition, are systematically derived by Hegel. Hegel is able to conduct this derivation because he grasps the deeper ontological import of these laws, that is the way in which the subject matter of logic (negation, affirmation, proposition and so on) can be traced back to a more primordial ontological foundation (nothingness, being, essence). I join others, like Priest, who consider Hegel a dialetheist, but supplement this view. I do so with an account of Hegel as responding to a different paradoxes than the ones that concern contemporary dialetheists. The paradox concerns the notion of identity, which can only relate what is already different. It was one noted by Russell and Wittgenstein after Hegel but not resolved by them in the same way he proposes.

This chapter considers Hegel's treatment of the further subtopics of traditional logic, concept, judgment and syllogism. It demonstrates how Hegel resolves the logocentric predicament by deriving the subject matter of logic, and its diverse forms, from a more primative foundation that does not already presuppose them. It aso considers the alternative views of Kreines and Stern and the role of empiricism in Hegel's system and of Ancient and modern forms of skepticism.

This chapter continues the earlier one's project of outlining Hegel's critique of metaphysics, and distinguishing it from Kant's own. It does so by considering Hegel's relationship to Kant's Transcnendental Dialectic and its three main divisions: paralogisms, antinomies and Ideal. It explains the distinction between finite and infinite categories in Hegel, as well as its bearing on his dispute with Kant. It also finishes the task, begun in Chapter 2, of reconstructing Hegel's ontological proof and response to Kant's critique of this form of argument.

This chapter describes Hegel's critique of the logic of the Aristotelian tradition, going back to Aristotle's organon. It argues that Hegel has an immanent critique of this logic, according to which it cannot justify itself in a non-question begging way. It explains why Hegel regards this logic as empirical, even though it is not so in any straightforward way. Some attention to the constitutivism of the Aristotelian tradition, and its interest in the norms internal to certain capacities or faculties we possess. This is not psychologism, in Frege's sense, but it is objectionably psychological according to Hegel. At the close, I suggest that Hegel's critique of Aristotle's logic is effectively the same as his critique of Kantian pure general logic.

A truly self-standing science grasps not only its subject matter but also itself. As we saw in earlier chapters, formal logic, both in Aristotle and in Kant, does not meet this standard, according to Hegel. It has presuppositions, chief among them psychological ones, it cannot itself validate. This chapter interprets the final sections of Hegel's logic as resolving this problem of self-comrpehension and explains how it concludes Hegel's struggle to overcome the logocentric predicament.

This introduction describes the place of formal logic in Hegel's logic and outlines the problem to which Hegel will respond: the logocentric predicament. It explains why this problem became important in the wake of Kant's critical philosophy, which Kant's idealist successors accused of relying on logic in an uncritcal way. It further goes into versions of the problem that have arisen in philosophy before Hegel and since, especially in Frege, Wittgenstein and more recent analytical philosophy. Finally, it distinguishes the approach I take to post-Kantian logic from that of Robert Pippin.

Moving beyond Hegel's critique of Kantian general logic and the logic of the Aristotelian tradition, this chapter considers his critique of Kant's transcendental logic: specifically, the Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. It offers an account of Hegel's famed swimming objection, going beyond previous ones by arguing that the objection has a more specific target than is often realized: the Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories. It further explains Hegel's dissatisfaction of the efforts of two of Kant's successors (Reinhold and Fichte) to overcome the dilemma the swimming objection presents. Some attention is given here to Fichte's project of deriving the categories from a version of the cogito, that is post-Kantian rather than the one familiar from Cartesian rational psychology. In my view, it is Jacobi and Romanticism who furnish Hegel with the possibility of deriving the categories from a post-Kantian version of the ontological proof – though he rejects their irrationalism. This explains Hegel's provocative claim that the ontological argument, and its rigorous distinction between the modes of thinking appropriate to finite and infinite entities, constitutes the true self-critique of reason.

This chapter explains Hegel's critique of pre-Kantian metaphysics, distinguishing it from Kant's own. The shortcomings of "the former metaphysics" are due not to going beyond the bounds of reason but to an uncritical relationship to traditional logic. Hence its lack of self-criticism is analogous to that exhibited by Kant, meaning that the former metaphysics and its most famous idealist critic commit the same mistake.