Review of Hauping Lu-Adler, Kant and the Science of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)

Huaping Lu-Adler provides a much-needed book on Immanuel Kant’s logic that considers a number of controversies that have been at play for more than fifty years, namely since the publication of Gerhard Lehmann’s edition of Kant’s Vor- lesungen über Logik as volume 24 of the Akademie-Ausgabe in 1966. Strangely enough, while Benno Erdmann and Erich Adickes are remembered for their work on the Reflexionen (203), Lehmann does not receive any mention – not even for criticizing the accuracy of his edition, which is indeed not easy to defend. The editors of the later-discovered Vorlesungen likewise receive no mention. This does not take anything away, however, from the useful notes on sources and abbrevia- tions that open the volume, which in fact is not about editing Kant’s logical texts but rather about providing a complete account of his philosophy of logic. Lu-Adler sets off with the argument that, due to the peculiar challenges posed by Kant’s logic corpus, it is convenient to take the approach of the history of philosophical problems (see Marco Sgarbi, “Concepts vs. Ideas vs. Problems”, in: Begriffs-, Ideen- und Problemgeschichte im 21. Jahrhundert, Wiesbaden: Harras- sowitz, 2011, 69–80), which is the most apt for reconstructing a theory of logic that is maximally coherent, philosophically interesting and historically original. One cannot disagree with Manfred Kuehn that Kant, “like many of his contemporaries, dared to think for himself”, with the aim of being a Selbstdenker “in the service of science and humanity, not [a] member[.] of some sect” (18). However, against Lu-Adler’s claim that there “is no ready version of a history of problems in refer- ence to which Kant’s conception of logic might stand out as original” (17), one ought to point out that the problem of providing an introduction to logic is very old. It dates back to Galen’s Institutio logica, received an effective systematization in the Renaissance in the short treatise De natura logicae by Jacopo Zabarella, and was again reiterated after Kant by G. W. F. Hegel in the first pages of the Wissenschaft der Logik. Put very simply, the conundrum at the basis of the problem runs as follows: if logic is supposed to introduce the whole of philosophy, how can one provide a philosophical introduction to logic? (see Hans-Friedrich Fulda, Das Problem einer Einleitung in Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik, Frankfurt a. M.: Kloster- mann, 1965; Riccardo Pozzo, Kant und das Problem einer Einleitung in Kants Logik, Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1989).