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A priori philosophy of nature in Hegel and German rationalism
- Hegel's many remarks that seem to imply that philosophy should proceed completely a priori pose a problem for his philosophy of nature since, on this reading, Hegel offers an a priori derivation of empirical results of natural sciences. We show how this perception can be mitigated by interpreting Hegel's remarks as broadly in line with the pre-Kantian rationalist notion of a priori and offer reasons for doing so. We show that, rather than being a peculiarity of Hegel's philosophy, the practice of demonstrating a priori the results of empirical sciences was widespread in the pre-Kantian rationalist tradition. We argue that this practice was intelligible in light of the notion of a priori that was still quite prominent during Hegel's life. This notion of a priori differs from Kant's in that, while the latter's notion concerns propositions, the former concerned only their demonstration. According to it, the same proposition could be demonstrated both a posteriori and a priori. Post-Kantian idealists likewise developed projects ofHegel's many remarks that seem to imply that philosophy should proceed completely a priori pose a problem for his philosophy of nature since, on this reading, Hegel offers an a priori derivation of empirical results of natural sciences. We show how this perception can be mitigated by interpreting Hegel's remarks as broadly in line with the pre-Kantian rationalist notion of a priori and offer reasons for doing so. We show that, rather than being a peculiarity of Hegel's philosophy, the practice of demonstrating a priori the results of empirical sciences was widespread in the pre-Kantian rationalist tradition. We argue that this practice was intelligible in light of the notion of a priori that was still quite prominent during Hegel's life. This notion of a priori differs from Kant's in that, while the latter's notion concerns propositions, the former concerned only their demonstration. According to it, the same proposition could be demonstrated both a posteriori and a priori. Post-Kantian idealists likewise developed projects of demonstrating specific scientific contents a priori. We then make our discussion more concrete by examining a particular case of an a priori derivation of a natural law, namely the law of fall, by both Leibniz and Hegel.…
Author details: | Lorenzo SalaORCiD, Anton KabeshkinORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2044753 |
ISSN: | 0960-8788 |
ISSN: | 1469-3526 |
Title of parent work (English): | British journal for the history of philosophy : Bjhp |
Publisher: | Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group |
Place of publishing: | London |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2022/03/24 |
Publication year: | 2022 |
Release date: | 2023/12/07 |
Tag: | Hegel; Leibniz; Philosophy of Nature; Wolff; a priori |
Volume: | 30 |
Issue: | 5 |
Number of pages: | 21 |
First page: | 797 |
Last Page: | 817 |
Funding institution: | Core Junior Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest |
Organizational units: | Philosophische Fakultät / Institut für Philosophie |
DDC classification: | 1 Philosophie und Psychologie / 10 Philosophie / 100 Philosophie und Psychologie |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Publishing method: | Open Access / Hybrid Open-Access |
License (German): | CC-BY-NC-ND - Namensnennung, nicht kommerziell, keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International |