Sebastian
Welcome - interesting thoughts - my main encounter with Hegel is through
Borchardt's 'Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy' - which i believe is
a Hegelian view of history with much talk of the Geist - i wonder whether
this view of history in terms of 'spirit of an age' is also quite a
'magical' view - and how this sits with modern history writing??
mogg
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-----Original Message-----
From: Society for The Academic Study of Magic
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Sebastian Alexis
Ghelerman
Sent: 17 April 2007 14:51
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] magic and logic
Hello everyone. I´m new on the list. I´m a social anthropologyst from
Argentina. I´m really interested in magic and its development along history.
A hint regarding this topic:
Have you considered that the hegelian dialectic has much in common with
some philosophical bases of the alchemy?. For e.g: the process
Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis uses the same logic pattern as the "Solve et
Coagula", where "Solve" is the dissolution of the prime matter, "et" is
related to the purification process of the stone and "Coagula" is the
solidification of the result of the other two. My thought, and it´s only an
hypothesis, is that during medieval times and beyond, as other author
describe, the philosophical abstraction was integrated with the religious
contents and magical "thought" and it´s only through Bacon, Newton,
Descartes and so on, that the science as an abstracted system of thought was
set appart from the "illussion" of the other ways of seeing the universe.
Hegel, is "victim of the spirit of his times", which was the time of
progress and rational thought.
It´s a nice discussion.
See you.
Sebastian
On 4/16/07, Brian Morton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Actually the story of Medieval Logic is pretty cool.
Dialectic was the Platonic form of logic, and that of the Stoics and
the Skeptics and most other Greek and Hellenistics, but Aristotle and
Euclid, used very monological styles even in the Ancient world.
Right before the collapse of Rome, there was a form of heresy called
Arianism, that became a big threat to the authorities in Rome, and
Arians loved using Aristotle, so Clement of Alexandria decided to make
it a policy to teach all Christian priests just enough Aristotlean logic
to be able to oppose the Arians. When Rome fell, the Stoic and
Skeptical arts of dialectic were mostly lost, and what survived was
Aristotelian logic, and a fair bit of Plato (via Boethius).
The medievals rebuilt a style of dialogue based argumentation on their
own, that had little to do with the older dialectic forms (it was
probably partly based on Roman legal practices). This medieval
"dialectic" was the 2nd part of the trivium, and part of the education
off all educated medievals. Aquinas, and the other philosophers and
theologians, are intensely dialectical in their style, but not at all in
the way the Stoics were. And it had lots of interesting developments
(see http://www.pvspade.com/Logic/ for lots of detailed downloadables
on medieval dialectics). Also the medieval faux-dialogues, are often
edited versions of real dialogues called quodlibets, that were ancestors
to the modern thesis defense, rather than hypothetical dialogues. The
Black Plague killed off this stuff, and later humanists developed
Topical logics, and then Term logics that were quite different. From
1350-1800's European logics are not very dialectical.
Kant re-introduces the notion of the dialectic, which for him means "a
logic of appearances" rather than a logic of how things actually are
(related to Aristotle's grudging use). Hegel, knows enough history of
logic to recognize the Kantian, Medieval, and Platonic notions and try
to play with them all. He's drawing on Christian stuff (both mystical
types like Boehm, and non-mystics like Ockham) and Deist stuff like
Kant, and older pagan stuff like Socrates or Plato (but probably not
folks like Sextus or Chrysippus).
>>> Sharon Stravaigne <[log in to unmask]> 4/14/2007 11:06 AM
>>>
In a message dated 4/14/2007 7:59:12 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
Presumably the Hegelian dialectic is part of that classical (pagan)
tradition -??
i'm assuming that 'dialectic' was not such
a strong part of the christian tradition??
bb
mogg
Both styles seem to have been in use in early Christian times,
though
in one case it may have been an actual conversation recalled,
they
weren't much on fiction until later.
The monograph style dominated later I think, but there is
something
I noticed which may be a kind of hybrid, or you could view it
as left
over from dialog style. This is where in a monograph, the
speaker
says, "but if someone should say blah blah, then I would
answer
blah blah." This is almost like a dialogue but one that is
obviously
hypothetical instead of presented as if real like in a play,
and then
of course you have the arguments between people writing
letters
and yelling at each other in debates.
I haven't read all of it, I glanced at Aquinas years ago, and
I
recall
that in his presentation of all the arguments pro and con on
every
conceivable matter, which was tedious, I suppose you could
say
that he dialectized on both sides.
Sharon
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