Logic and Existence

This first English translation illuminates Hegelianism's most obscure dialectical synthesis: the relation between the phenomenology and the logic. This book is essential for understanding the development of French thought in this century.

Logic and Existence, which originally appeared in 1952, completes the project Hyppolite began with Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Taking up successively the role of language, reflection, and categories in Hegel's Science of Logic, Hyppolite illuminates Hegelianism's most obscure dialectical synthesis: the relation between the phenomenology and the logic.

His interpretation of the relation between the phenomenology and the logic has the result of marking a rupture in French thought. Not only does Logic and Existence effectively end the humanistic reading of Hegel popularized by Kojève in France before World War II, but also it initiates the great anti-Hegelianism of French philosophy in the sixties. Hyppolite's work displays the originality of Hegel's thought in a new way, and sets up the means by which to escape from it. If the phrase "the philosophy of difference" defines French anti-Hegelianism, then we have to say that there would be no philosophy of difference without Logic and Existence. Derrida's notion of differance, Deleuze's logic of sense, and Foucault's reconception of history all stem from this book. This first English translation of the virtually unknown Logic and Existence is essential for the understanding of the development of French thought in this century.

Jean Hyppolite (1907–1968) was a professor at Strasbourg and then the Sorbonne as well as serving as Director of the Ecole Normale Superieure. He is the author of Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit; Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of History; and Studies on Marx and Hegel. Leonard Lawlor is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Memphis and is the author of Imagination and Chance: The Difference Between the Thought of Ricoeur and Derrida also published by SUNY Press. Amit Sen is a doctoral student at the University of Memphis.