Hegel's Philosophy of Natural Sciences

According to the traditional account of Newton's appraisal of Kepler's laws (Small 1804, Brewster 1841) Kepler's empirical laws served as the foundation of thr whole theory of Newton, whose discoveries sprang immediately from them, as a simple and straightforwrd development. This traditional account has been challenged by Curtis Wilson in 1974. Hegel was aware of that account, already proposed by Schubert as early as 1798, and unlike Mach, he did not share the view that "Kepler had deduced from the observations of Tycho Brahe and his own, three empirical laws for the motion of the planets about the sun, which newton by his new view rendered intelligible". In this paper I examine Schubert's argument, claiming that he does not question the validity tout court of Newton's mathematical demonstration of Kepler's areal law and that Hgel stresses only the pars destruens of it,in order to find a scientific support for his own critical objection. Furthermore, I am concerned with solving the following problems:given that Schubert's criticism points out the mathematical level to which Newton's demonstration can be taken for valid and is not a confutation of his proof, even if Hegel was making use of Schubert in his 1801 approach to the subject, this does not suffice to account for the scientific source of his basic charge that the Principia's mathematical demonstration as such is unreliable. Finally, I present some textual evidence in favour of an unknown source of Hegel's criticism in De orbitis /as well as in the Phenomenology, the Science of Logic, the Encyclopaedia, whenever Hegel deals with the interplay between centrifugal and centripetal forces): the 1724 Traité de physique by Father Castel.

The aim of this paper, delivered at the 2007 conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, is to contribute to the current debate about nature’s recalcitrance to full rational determination from the standpoint of its inexhaustibility, stressed in Hegel’s analysis of the scientific description and classification of natural things in the Phenomenology. It supports the claim that in “Observing Reason” Hegel reconstructs the genesis and functions of scientific theories within shapes of consciousness which are also necessary and irreplaceable advances toward the concept of absolute knowing, casting light on the presupposition of the systematic Philosophy of Nature. By referring to a series of examples drawn from Hegel’s treatment of mechanics, chemistry and electricity based on first-hand research in Jena libraries, and focusing on the investigation of the pure conditions of the empirical laws of nature, the paper points out the awareness of working scientists about experiments and documents Hegel’s view on the inversion of consciousness’s initial standpoint, which took experience and observation as the sole source of truth. It shows how it emerges for rational self-consciousness itself that the truth of the laws of nature lies in the concept, accounting for the explanatory completeness of the essential, inward and stable significance of the sensuous external transitory being of the natural things. The paper concludes that from the real to the ideal side in the course of the advancements in natural sciences we have experienced the transformation of the external (mind-independent) being of the immense realm of phenomena into a being-that-is-thought as their truth, whereas from the ideal to the real side modern scientific knowledge of nature have experienced the transformation of the internal (mind-dependent) thought from a formal way of reducing multiplicity to unities by abstraction and subsumption, into categorial thinking determining the true objectivity of the sensuous particulars.

Hegel offers an original theory of life that does justice to both the purposive subjectivity and the self-organizing objectivity of living things, and demonstrates that the two are not incompatible. This dissertation provides a comprehensive and critical commentary on Hegel's theory of life, and hopes to show that it is not only an outstanding attempt at a philosophical comprehension of life but also a serious challenge to accounts that conflate life with what it enables or what it requires. The first part focuses on Hegel's logical categorization of life, which explicates the Idea of life as a logical category that is laid out irrespective of the kinds of living things there actually are. It first shows why the living individual is irreducible to mechanical and chemical processes, distinguishable from artifacts, and intelligible without bringing in any alien principle. Next, it elaborates on how the living individual as an internally purposive, self-sustaining, and self-driven process develops and sustains the collective unity of its objectivity, sustains and regenerates itself in the face of its other, and raises its universal identity beyond its particular existence through reproduction. Again the first part investigates the extent to which Hegel's characterization of the fundamental features of life allows for a distinction between merely organic unity and true subjective unity that exhibits inner determinacy. The second part of the dissertation explores Hegel's treatment of life in his Philosophy of Nature. In this work he explicates plant and animal life as the two universal forms of life, whose necessary and universal features are enabled by similarly universal structures and processes of nature. In parallel with the three moments of the logical categorization of life, this part compares and contrasts the organic unity, metabolism, and reproduction of the plant and the animal. It discusses the extent to which these forms reflect the logical

This paper recounts a dramatic paradigm shift in the debate on the value and significance of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, from the harsh criticism it faced over the past two centuries to its reappraisal, in the last three decades, through both the vindication of Hegel’s competence in the empirical sciences and the appreciation of his assessment of organic life and habitat, at the intersection with anthropology. The paper concludes with the most recent trends in scholarship, which focus on the problem of the naturality of man in respect to culture and to democratic societies and on the systematic  transition from Hegel’s philosophy of nature to the philosophy of spirit.

This 1991 article puts forward a series of results of my research on Hegel’s early philosophy of nature which later merged into the running commentary to the pars construens of the 1801 Dissertatio (Haupt 1995). §1 deals with the early reception of De orbitis which mainly focussed on Hegel’s alleged errors and its seemingly Schellingian derivation, supported also by Michelet’s 1841 Preface to Hegel’s encyclopedic Naturphilosophie, who spoke about the two “divine twins” of Jena. I underscore that Schelling regarded gravity as the manifestation of the absolute identity posited under the form of quantitative difference at the level of the mere foundation of reality (see his 1801 Darstellung meines Systems, §§92-3).  By contrast, in De orbitis Hegel conceives gravity as the principle of identity that is the “one and the same” force positing quantitative variation and relations within its manifestations. Throughout the Dissertation Hegel uses the phrase “one and the same” to the define either gravity or the notion of the phenomenon of motion in its entirety.  Schelling was aware of this divergence and wished to hide this controversy. In literally quoting (in the original Latin) a passage from De orbitis in his Fernere Darstellungen Schelling altered Hegel’s expression: “per vis centripetae, centrifugae et gravitatis quantitatem unum idemque totius motus phenomenon ita determinatur (p. 12, 27-29), by changing unum idemque (one and the same) into unum idem (the same one), where no room is left for establishing a positive appreciation of the relationship between identity and difference. In light of my 1995 “Guide to Hegel’s De orbitis planetarum and to its editions and translations”, this  point was bearing on the issue whether in 1801 Hegel’s conception of the absolute as substance (in agreement with Schelling's view) followed Spinoza’s philosophy of the one substance as a static object of thought and principle of reality, according to the (in the 90ties) received view that Hegel was coming to conceive the absolute not only as substance but equally as a self-determining subject only from 1804 onwards. In this regard it is worth noting that: 1. the VII of the Theses premitted to the Dissertation claims that “the matter of the postulate of Reason, which the critical philosophy displays, destroys philosophy itself, and is the principle of Spinozism”; 2. On page 23, 5-6 in criticizing mechanistic physics (together with Kant’s attempt to ground a dynamics and Newton’s conception of the relation between God and world as ‘Unius dominium’in the Scholium generale of the II ed. of the Principia) Hegel claims that such a physics cannot conceive neither the true notion of God , nor the true force (of gravity) nor what is internal and necessary, because it “cannot arrive at a principle of identity that posits difference within itself”. On Schelling’s view at the time, by contrast, the task of a philosophy of nature was to advance a “spinozism of physics” (Einleitung zu den Entwurf §2), where (as claimed in the Weltseele) the motion of one thing  is the objective expression of its (quiescent) mutual connection with other things (as is the case with light and not with gravity), which “macht das Ding selbst in der Ruhe dennoch zum Spiegel des Ganzen”: otherwise stated, around 1801 Shelling hold the view that the principle of identity in nature would have been one of ‘mirroring’, i.e, an identity of identity and identity. More than one decade ago, George di Giovanni has observed that the passage from De orbitis mentioned above  about the "principium identatis quod in se ipso differentiam ponat" provides “further evidence for the claim that H.S. Harris has defended over the years, namely that from the beginning, though constantly (even compulsively) borrowing the language of others, Hegel had been developing an idealism typically his own (The Owl of Minerva, 29:2, 1998; in Italy the same view was shared by Remo Bodei - in regard to the Dfferenzschrift -  and Antimo Negri - in regard to De orbitis and the Article on the natural right). § 2 deals with the charge of apriorism levelled against Hegel’s claim about the figure of the earth. I show that by taking “axi” either as an ablative of limitation (or a dative of vantage), this disparaging reading is not the only one admitted by Hegel’s Latin. In §3 I argue against the confusion of what is ludic with what is ironical, irony being a serious conceptual tool in Hegel’s hands which combines obliqueness, polysemia and polemical efficacy, examining his pun on “malum”. In §4 I deal with the various meanings of Hegel’s opening reference to a Ciceronian passage on the merit of Socrates. In § 5 I examine in detail Hegel’s polemics against the attribution of forces in a physical sense to centres which are mathematical points, that is, against the generality of Newton’s analytical method. In §6 I argue for a first hyronical restatement of the Platonic series for the distances of the planets, followed by a second speculative manipulation of a different series based on square and cube powers. I have reworked and deepened this aspect (the most controversial of Hegel’s Dissertatio) in a later paper: "Tra etica e filosofia della natura: il significato della Metafisica aristotelica per il problema delle grandezze del sistema solare nel primo Hegel", in G. Movia (a cura di), Hegel e Aristotele, Atti del Convegno di Cagliari (11-15 aprile 1994), Edizioni AV, Cagliari, 1997, pp. 135-201.

Since there is no really elaborated theory of the dialectic of nature, it is not only desirable but necessary to take a look at some of Hegel's original intuitions, which in many cases lost their di-stinctness in his later works, or fell victim to the exigencies of his system. Philosophy makes use not only of reasoning but also of intuition. In respect of the mass which offers persistent resistance to a notional solution, it is important to find a suitable image for developing a first approximation to the understanding of the question. According to Hegel, the metaphors of circular and gyratory motion are well-suited for this. Here it is essential to clarify what we can gain by a structural interpretation of such ideas. I think that an attempt has to be made to bring out the contemporary relevance of the topic. Doing so is always a delicate matter, but it is a must if undertakings of the present kind are to be anything more than philological expositions of Hegel's philosophy, if they are to make a real contribution to reflection on the foundations of physics. I shall first give a brief review of the arguments put forward in the Encyclopedia; then I shall analyse Hegel's interpretation of circular and gyratory motion and discuss the possibility of bringing out the relevance of his ideas; finally, I shall draw certain conclusions in respect of the principles involved in comprehending the divisibili-ty of matter, and in putting forward a philosophical interpretation of the theory of relativity.

This paper summarizes some results of an A. v. Humboldt-Foundation research project carried out in Jena (2005) on the scientific sources of Hegel’s treatment of the rational observation of nature in the Phenomenology, focusing on organics. The editorial notes to the critical edition of the Phenomenology have already retraced some of Hegel’s contemporaneous scientific sources for his objections to description and classification in natural sciences, his appreciation of new developments in electricity and chemistry, and his critical remarks on the attempt to fix laws for organical forces (sensibility, irritability, reproduction) as well on the scientific status of physiognomy and phrenology. In addition, this paper shows how Hegel took active part in the scientific debate of the time, by publicly siding with some strands of contemporaneous natural science against others and reveals that when Hegel: 1. questions the validity of a law-like fixed quantitative scheme, whether presented by a working scientist or a speculative philosopher of nature; 2. vindicates quality, fluidity, dynamical process, purposiveness, and contingency for genuinely knowing organic existence; 3. reacts against the inessentiality, indifference and formality of quantitative schemes which cannot account for relationships or transitions of qualities; 4. and, finally, criticizes the amount of imagination and arbitrareness that lies behind those attempts, he does so not only on the philosophical basis of accounting for self-differentiating and self-maintaining independent natural individuals but also on the natural-scientific reasons and concerns of modern experimental research.