Hegel’s Interpretation of the Liar Paradox

Abstract

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel develops a subtle analysis of Megarian paradoxes: the Liar, the Veiled Man and the Sorites. In this paper, we focus on Hegel's interpretation of the Liar. We note that in Hegel's treatment there are positive suggestions for a new analysis of the paradox. Faced with the Liar's sentence ‘µ’ that says ‘“µ” is false’, Hegel's idea is that the conjunction ‘µ and not µ’ is to be held true, but the two conjuncts ‘µ’ and ‘not µ’, separately taken, are untrue. Other parts of Hegel's work confirm the idea that a true contradiction for him is made of two untrue sentences, which is an interesting but unusual account of inconsistency. In this paper, we explore the plausibility of the hypothesis with the lens of the contemporary theories of paradoxes. We compare Hegel's view with standard dialetheism, and we present Hegel's idea of truth which underlies the theory.