Bolzano e Hegel

Bolzano’s allergy to Hegel’s works is a fact that is emphasized in every introduction to his philosophy. Yet he tried to familiarize with this thinking he rejected more than others, in accordance with his intellectual ethics, and even came to the point where he accepted some Hegelian reflections. In order to refine our understanding of Bolzano’s relation to Hegel, in this article I propose to reconstruct the polemic of the Three essays about Hegel by showing that it actually tallies forms of anti-Hegelianism that have become canonical (for example his criticism of the Hegelian philosophy of history), but that its context specifies it. In a second part, I analyze the philosophical differences that focus Bolzano’s reading and necessitate Bolzano’s criticism of Hegel and his pupils, in which he sees a philosophical and social regression. These are differences over the role of language and philosophy, over the relation between representations and reality and over the definition of the infinite, which are underlying the polemic of the Three essays. However their formulation is to be found in other parts of the Bolzanian corpus.