Thread by @B4Btv

If we philosophers were to neglect mathematics, we would be doing so at our own peril. It's our standards of scholarship that would deteriorate as a result. Below is an egregious example from Hegel scholarship.

https://twitter.com/beingandslime/status/1291398790151376896

For the 1832 Seinslogik, which he completed shortly before his death, Hegel added several new Anmerkungen to the chapter on Quantum, one of them being on differential calculus. There, he makes use of binomial expansion to illustrate his point about Potenz, but there's a typo!

The first term of the expansion should obviously be 𝗒ⁿ and there's no way Hegel didn't know that, so whoever set the type must have made the error. And Hegel died before the book was published, so he was in no position to correct it — but its subsequent editors certainly were.

Leopold von Henning, who edited the Science of Logic for the Werke published soon after Hegel's death, completely missed the typo and simply reproduced it. That began what is now an almost 200-year-long tradition of editors failing to notice this elementary mistake.

Moldenhauer/Michel (Suhrkamp Werke 5) and Gawoll (Philosophische Bibliothek 385) both reproduce the typo without comment and even Hogemann/Jaeschke's Gesammelte Werke 21 makes this mistake. The same goes for Stekeler's commentary, published only last year.

Editors of translations, who spend more time grappling with and going over the text than editors of the original, haven't fared any better. They too continue the tradition. Here are Miller's and di Giovanni's translations into English and Jarczyk/Labarrière's into French.

We've had nearly 200 years' worth of opportunities to correct this simple mistake and yet here we are still repeating it at our own peril. We really need get our shit together.

I first noticed the typo back in 2014, when I was part of a weekly Science of Logic reading group at UCL and it was my turn to do a presentation on the week's reading, which was this Anmerkung. In 2015, I alerted Houlgate to it, he checked the GW edition and notified its editors.

Houlgate was (and I suppose still is) working on the sequel to The Opening of Hegel's Logic which will cover this Anmerkung. He was reading up on Lagrange's work on the calculus at the time, which Hegel discusses in the Anmerkung. I'm very much looking forward to it.

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