Introduction

The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences is the outline of Hegel's whole system, written for his lectures, in three parts: logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit. Its logic, shorter and clearer than his great Science of Logic, is known as the 'Lesser Logic' and is the usual entrance to Hegel's dialectic. For Hegel logic is not merely the formal rules of thought but the structure of things themselves. The book begins with the emptiest concept, 'being'; being and 'nothing' pass into each other to become 'becoming', and from this unfold quality, quantity and measure; it then moves into the doctrine of essence, with identity and difference, appearance and essence, cause and effect, and finally into the doctrine of the concept, up to the 'absolute Idea'. The Additions, taken by students from his spoken lectures, are lively and clear, a treasury for understanding the dialectic.