From Ontology to Dialectics

CU Course on Hegel, Part 6a

From Ontology to Dialectics

From Being, through Essence, to Notion. We have been through this sequence once with Andy Blunden. Now he takes us through it again. Click on the link below to download two of Andy’s lectures, compiled together.

Did you ever wonder quite what makes Quantity turn into Quality? Hegel gives a much fuller explanation of this than Engels did in “Anti-Dühring”. Not that Engels was to blame. How was he to know that his own brief works would be more familiar to posterity than those of his master in philosophy, Hegel?

Ontology is a philosophical word for the way things follow one from another. The illustration above is a computer person’s visualisation of “ontology”, for the purposes of designing computers and software.

Hegel undermined the idea of ontology. Andy Blunden explains how, and why, it can’t just be “one damned thing after another”.

In the second of Andy’s two lectures, Andy moves into the “Essence” part, where we are dealing with dialectics in the Hegel way.

Andy Blunden’s lectures need little introduction, because they contain enough that is clear and could be understood and discussed by any study circle.

We must move through the material. The next time we pass along this road we will recognise many landmarks that we have noted this time, and next time we will also notice some more that we did not see this time.

Please download and read this text via the link:

From Ontology to Dialectics, Andy Blunden, 2007 (6739 words)

Further reading:

Excerpts on Essence and Notion (2186 words)