Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

I. Exclusion of empirical and abstract concepts.

I. Accepting the doctrine, which culminates in the last great modern philosophy of the pure Concept, as the only doctrine of logical truth, this Logic excludes empirical and abstract concepts, declaring them to be irreducible to the pure concept.

II. Non-theoretic character of the second and autonomy of the empirical and mathematical sciences.

II. Accepting for these last the economic theory of the empirical and abstract sciences and considering them as having a practical character and therefore as non-concepts (pseudoconcepts), this Logic denies that they exhaust logical thought, indeed it altogether denies that they belong to it and demonstrates that their very existence presupposes the reality of the pure concept. Hence, it connects the two doctrines with one another and asserts the autonomy of philosophy, at the same time respecting the relative autonomy of the empirical and mathematical sciences thus rendered atheoretical.

III. The concept as unity of distinctions.

III. In the doctrine concerning the organism of the pure concept, it accepts the dialectic view or the unity of opposites, but denies its immediate validity for the distinctions of the concept; the unity of which is organized as a unity of distinctions in the theory of degrees of reality. In this way, the autonomy of the forms of reality or of the spirit is also respected and the practical nature of error established.

IV. Identity of the concept with the individual judgment and of philosophy with history.

IV. The richness of reality, of facts, of experience, which seemed to be withdrawn from the pure concept and so from philosophy by the separation of it from the empirical sciences, is on the contrary restored to and recognized in philosophy, not in the diminished and improper form which is that of empirical science, but in a total and integral manner. This is effected by means of the connection, which is a unity, between Philosophy and History—a unity obtained by making clear and profoundly studying the nature of the concept and the logical a priori synthesis.

V. Impossibility of defining thought by means of verbal forms, and refutation of formalists Logic.

V. Finally, the doctrines and the presuppositions of formalist Logic are refuted in a precise manner. The autonomy of the logical form is asserted and consequently the effort to contain its determinations in words or expressive forms is declared to be vain. These are certainly necessary, but obey, not the law of logic, but that of the æsthetic spirit.