"Hegel's Metametaphysics. Logic and/as metaphysics in Hegel's Philosophy"

In the last decades of the 20th century a great portion of Hegel’s scholarship concentrated on the question as to whether Hegel was a metaphysical or an an- ti-metaphysical thinker. The debate has seldom focused on which notion of “meta- physics” Hegel refers to in his work. Through an analysis of the shifts in the status of metaphysics throughout the development of Hegel’s thought, this article considers whether an original notion of metaphysics can be traced in Hegel’s philosophy. We will consider the notion of metaphysics, first, within the Jena System-Drafts and then within the mature system. Through an analysis of Hegel’s notion of “objective thought”, we will then concentrate on the transformation of metaphysics into logic, which is the foundation of the very idea of a “science of logic”, and on the pas- sages where this transformation is achieved. In the conclusion, we will return to the question as to whether a notion of Hegelian metaphysics is possible.