Kant-Index: Band 5: Stellenindex und Konkordanz zur "Wiener Logik" (review)

The Wiener Logik has long led a shadowy existence. This has nothing to do with the quality of the text, but rather with accidental conditions. When the manuscript of the Wiener Logik was discovered in 1913, the planning of the Akademie-Ausgabe of Kant's complete works had already been largely completed and eight volumes of the works, three of the correspondence and two of the Nachlaß were published. Erich Adickes' edition of Kant's Reflexionen über die Logik appeared in 1914. Hinske suggests that, had Adickes considered it, the Wiener Logik would have played a valuable role in integrating Kant's reflections (xi). This double-volume makes up for all this by highlighting the relevance of this lecture transcript with special reference to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which is close to it not only in time but also systematically. It contains a lemmatized main index that makes a recognition of the language of the logic course possible and a concordance that allows one to check the corresponding passages. The introduction and more than twenty pages of editorial notes elaborate on the relationship of the Wiener Logik to other Kantian texts while correcting and integrating the references to sources indicated in its 1966 edition by Gerhard Lehmann within the Akademie-Ausgabe (lxxii-xcvi). At the same time, the index correcs more than one hundred fifty errors of the 1966 edition (lviii-lxvii).

The Wiener Logik was translated into English by J. Michael Young in the volume of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant dedicated to the Lectures on Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 251-377). Young made clear that the Wiener Logik is constituted by two different parts (ibid., xxv f.). In fact the manuscript shows a first part written by the hand of a professional copyist, which covers Kant's course until almost the end of the theory of judgement (Akademie-Ausgabe, vol. 24, 790-937), and a second part constituted by a single page written by another hand (probably a student while sitting in Kant's classroom), which deals with the very end of the theory of judgement and the beginning of the theory of syllogism (ibid., 937-40). One needs to recall, though, that the text of the Wiener Logik is incomplete, given that a large part of the theory of syllogism as well as the theory of method, of discourse and of character are missing. The first part of the Wiener Logik shows several parallels with the edited fragments of the Logik Hoffmann (ibid., 944-52), while the second part shows parallels with the Logik Hechsel, which was discovered in 1983 and has recently been made accessible by Tilman Pinder (cf. Logik-Vorlesungen: Unveröffentliche Nachschriften, Hamburg: Meiner, 1998, 271-499). In fact, J. Michael Young found it convenient to complete his translation of the missing parts of the Wiener Logik by the attaching to it the corresponding parts of the Logik Hechsel (cf. Lectures on Logic, 381-423).

Hinske provides new arguments as regards the dating of the Wiener Logik by objecting to both the late dating to the nineties suggested by Wilhelm Jerusalem and the early dating before 1781 by Reinhard Brandt and Tilman Pinder. Hinske remarks that while for the terminus ad quem one should consider the years indicated on the frontispice (1794 and 1796), the terminus a quo should be set after the final redaction of the Critique of Pure Reason (xxiii f.). Following Hinske's lead and on the basis of an accurate examination on the cross-references between the texts, Bruno Bianco has proposed that the terminus a quo be set not before the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (cf. the Italian translation edited by Bianco, Milan: Angeli, forthcoming).

What makes the Wiener Logik and this index particularly interesting for Kant...