Die Bedeutung des Widerspruchs für Eine Logik der Philosophie
The Significance of Contradictions for The Logic of Philosophy

Summary/Abstract: In philosophy, for a long time it was thought that self-contradiction is the mark of erroneous thinking. Th us, for the thinking of philosophers the logical demand was made that they must avoid all kinds of contradictions if that thinking is to be in line with the truth. Lately, with the discussion of paradoxes in the theory of classes, insight has been gained on the problem of the self-application of thought which has thrown a new light on self-contradiction. In the framework of the book The Logic of Contradiction, Robert Heiss attempted to give a defining method of philosophy by which it should be assembled and in showing those kinds of contradictions that cannot be eliminated and which are in a certain sense necessary for thinking, and not only for avoiding formal-logical contradictions. In that context, he explains the logical structure of self-referentialness, or auto-referential thinking, and he makes a correlation between tautology as a positive self-application of thinking, and selfcontradiction as a negative one. Th is paper reviews Heiss’ argumentation in detail and then connects his theory to the so-called “logic of philosophy”. At the end of the paper, the internal perspective of contradiction in philosophy is augmented with an external perspective of opposing positions and the postulating of the thesis of the principally “heterothetical” character of philosophizing.

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