We are pleased to announce that Professor Stephen Houlgate has been awarded one of the highly prestigious three year Leverhulme Trust Major Fellowships to pursue his work on Hegel’s Science of Logic. The fellowships enable well-established and distinguished researchers in the disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences to devote themselves to a single research project of outstanding originality and significance.

Professor Houlgate’s project is to write an accessible and original study of the Science of Logic (1812-16, 1832), which is one of the most important, but also most difficult and complex (and most neglected) texts in the history of Western philosophy. Professor Houlgate’s book, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic (2006), concentrated on the first part of the Logic: the “doctrine of being”. The focus of his Leverhulme project will be on the second and third parts of the Logic: the “doctrine of essence” and the “doctrine of the concept”. The doctrine of essence is where Hegel carries out his revolutionary critique of pre-Kantian metaphysics and Kantian “reflection”, and the doctrine of the concept is where he sets out the core of his own alternative, “speculative-dialectical” metaphysics (which itself builds on the thought of Aristotle).

Professor Houlgate’s project will involve not only clarifying Hegel’s often tortuous arguments, but also bringing out their philosophical significance by comparing Hegel’s understanding of specific concepts (such as identity, difference, form, substance, cause) with those of Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant and Deleuze. Professor Houlgate’s study of the Logic will be published by Oxford University Press.