A “Return” to the Traditions of Philosophical Logic (Sixteenth to Early Nineteenth Centuries): A Return or a Transformation?

Abstract

ABSTRACT This section reproduces the part of Bibler’s book Thinking as Creative Work (1975) that discusses the subject as a “microsocium” combining the rational intellect, reason, intelligence, and intuition. All of these were contained in and disappeared into thinking but were logically sensed as a combination of different logics. The philosopher’s task in relation to the human intellect was to realize and reproduce the interaction of these abilities into a unified action. Later in the book From the Doctrine of Science to the Logic of Culture (1991), Bibler analyzed Nicholas of Cusa’s logic in detail, where the intellect reconstructs all other cognitive abilities and endows them with historically inimitable content. Nicholas of Cusa calls logic a purely rational movement for freeing the power of the mind for properly logical transformations, ultimately linking the mind with ignorance. Later this section discusses the features of ancient, Renaissance, and early modern-era thought by turning to Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, in whose works the logical acquired a psychological justification. It was replaced by the logic of science, an analysis of which leads to the conviction that the advent of a new logic of culture is needed. Bibler shows that the logical intent of the Modern Philosophy was to order all of the previous logics into a continuous chain, which was justified by the very method of constructing scientific knowledge; logic thus became epistemology. Hegel was able to destroy all of the diversity of human abilities, incredibly expanding rational mind by introducing all of the definitions of cognition into it, but in the end it burst, revealing its truth as the truth of a holistic, dialectical reason. The development of a logic of structure, a logic of text, was a necessary process, but now we are addressing the ability to logically reproduce the predefinition of future logical systems. Now the logical development of the logic of text (formal logic) allows us to return to the potencies of philosophical logic of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries and its radical transformation. This was outlined by Marx in his early writings and in his preparatory work for Capital. It became necessary and possible to master the internal logical dialogue developed by the modern era’s thought and to express it in the new logic, the logic of culture.