Hegel, Kierkegaard and the Danish Debate about Mediation

Abstract

Hegel's works on logic played an important role in the reception of his philosophy in Denmark, where theScience of Logicfound a handful of Danish imitators in the 1830s and 1840s. Beginning in 1831, Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860) gave lectures on Hegel's speculative logic and published, as a help to his students, hisOutline of the Philosophy of Philosophy or Speculative Logic, as a kind of handbook. Despite some significant deviations from the original, this work can be fairly characterised as a copy of Hegel'sScience of Logic, at times bordering on paraphrase. In response to criticisms of Hegel's account of the beginning of philosophy, Heiberg also presented some of this material again in the form of an article entitled ‘The System of Logic’. This piece, which he published in his Hegelian journalPerseus(Heiberg 1838: 1-45), treats the initial categories of Hegel's logic and tries to defend the notion of philosophy beginning with the categories of being and nothing. There are also extensive critical treatments of different aspects of Hegel's logic in Frederik Christian Sibbern's (1785-1872)Remarks and Investigations Primarily Concerning Hegel's Philosophy, with Regard to our Age, published in the same year. Another overt attempt to imitate Hegel's logic can be found in Adolph Peter Adler's (1812-69)Popular Lectures on Hegel's Objective Logic, which was published in 1842. This work, which also started as university lectures, treats in highly didactical fashion about the first two-thirds of Hegel'sScience of Logic.