> The rejection of Idealism in the UK, Bradley, T.H. Green etc.
> excepted, and by the Pragmatists in the US was largely due to finding
> substantial contradictions within Hegel's work, given the evolution of logic
> by Frege, Russell et al and advances in physics, biology etc., no?
As I said, it was the concept of "internal relations" that Moore claimed was self-contradictory. He also claimed that "this very self-contradictory doctrine is the chief mark which shews the influence of Hegel upon modern philosophy." What other claims of contradiction do you have in mind?
In the rest, you again seem to claim that deductive reasoning from premises that treat relations as external can be "dialectical" i.e. used to represent the idea that they are internal. How for instance can the idea of "recursion" be used to represent internal relations?
"the sense which has been most prominent in recent uses of the term 'organic whole' is one whereby it asserts the parts of a whole to have a property which the parts of no whole can possibly have. It is supposed that just as the whole would not be what it is but for the existence of the parts, so the parts would not be what they are but for the existence of the whole; and this is understood to mean not merely that any particular part could not exist unless the others existed too ..., but actually that the part is no distinct object of thought - that the whole, of which it is a part, is in its turn a part of it. That this supposition is self-contradictory a very little reflection should be sufficient to show. We may admit, indeed, that when a particular thing is a part of a whole, it does possess a predicate which it would not otherwise possess - namely that it is a part of that whole. But what cannot be admitted is that this predicate alters the nature or enters into the definition of the thing which has it. When we think of the part itself, we mean just that which we assert, in this case, to have the predicate that it is part of the whole; and the mere assertion that it is a part of the whole involves that it should be distinct from that which we assert of it. Otherwise we contradict ourselves since we assert that, not it, but something else - namely it together with that which we assert of it - has the predicate which we assert of it. In short, it is obvious that no part contains analytically the whole to which it belongs, or any other parts of that whole. The relation of part to whole is not the same as that of whole to part; and the very definition of the latter is that it does contain analytically that which is said to be a part. And yet this very self-contradictory doctrine is the chief mark which shews the influence of Hegel upon modern philosophy - an influence which pervades the whole of orthodox philosophy. This is what is generally implied by the cry against falsification by abstraction: that a whole is always a part of its part! 'If you want to know the truth about a part,' we are told, 'you must consider not that part, but something else - namely the whole: nothing is true of the part, but only of the whole.' Yet plainly it must be true of the part at least that it is part of the whole; and it is obvious that when we say it is, we do not mean merely that the whole is a part of itself. This doctrine, therefore, that a part can have 'no meaning or significance apart from its whole' must be utterly rejected. It implies itself that the statement 'This is a part of that whole' has a meaning; and in order that this may have one, both subject and predicate must have a distinct meaning." (Principia Ethica, pp. 84-5)
Ted