Ранносредновековната диалектика и Хегеловата история на философията
Early Medieval Dialectics and Hegel’s History of Philosophy

Summary/Abstract: The following article investigates the relationship between early medieval Latin authors and their understanding of the study of logic, along with the Hegelian approach towards dialectical logic as a necessary path leading to absolute knowledge. The authors who I am presenting are Augustine, Boethius, Cassiodor, Isidore and Alcuin. The article advances two theses. Firstly, I claim that Hegel’s dialectical logic is a result of the attempt to reconcile critical philosophy with pre-critical metaphysics by overcoming their essential weaknesses. For this reason scholasticism plays a pivotal role in his own system, although not quite explicitly. My second claim is that a thorough analysis of early medieval logic could question Hegel’s generally negative assessment of medieval philosophy. He barely gives any coherent account on early medieval philosophy besides making a few general remarks and claiming that John Scot Eriugena who lived in the 9th century was the first true medieval philosopher.However, the early medieval tradition played an important role for the formation of curricula in the later centuries, respectively in the 11th, 12th and the 13th centuries. Augustine, Boethius, Cassiodor, Isidore and Alcuin all in their own lifetime produced some of the most important texts that shaped medieval philosophy, even after Aristotle’s corpus was rediscovered in the West in the 1150s. These authors also contribute to Hegel’s own notion of dialectics. Their works allow us to draw the conclusion that logic is not merely an instrument used by all the other philosophical disciplines. In its own right, logic or dialectics, as they call it, is a philosophical discipline– such that encompasses all other philosophical disciplines and enables their classification and systematization.

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