Hello Bruce,

Oddly enough I learned about this division of metaphysics into general metaphysics (which deals with the categories and is the function of the understanding or finite thought) and special metaphysics (which deals with the three Ideas and is the function of reason or infinite thought) from Heidegger (somewhere or another in one of the 20 sets of his lectures that I read).

This distinction applies immediately to Kant's first critique. The first part deals with the categories as determining the understanding (determining its ability to engage with objects outside itself). And the second part, of course, deals with reason which deals with the three ideas (each of which, and the three together, forms a whole).

Kant, of course, denied the possibility of reason--and hence of special metaphysics. To know the whole is simply not a possibility for him. Trying to do so leads to contradictions.

Hegel, then, tries to rescue reason, knowledge of the whole in its three forms, from Kant's attack.

So both Kant and Hegel deal with the categories, with general metaphysics--what Pippin correctly calls transcendental logic because the object is transcendental to us or outside us.

But Hegel tries to rescue special metaphysics or reason. Pippin seems to have no knowledge of this at all.

John