Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (3)
Language
- English (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (3)
Keywords
- Hegel (1)
- Leibniz (1)
- Philosophy of Nature (1)
- Wolff (1)
- a priori (1)
Institute
In this article, I discuss the specific ways in which Hegel's account of life and organisms advances upon Kant's account of natural purposes in the third Critique. First of all, I argue that it is essential for Hegel's account that it contains two levels. The first level is that of logical life, the discussion of which does not depend on any empirical knowledge of natural organisms. I provide my reconstruction of this logical account of life that answers to the objection made by a number of Hegel scholars to the effect that Hegel does in fact rely on empirical knowledge at this place in the logic. The second level is that of natural organisms themselves. I argue that it is with the help of this separation of the logical and natural levels, as well as his doctrine of the impotence of nature, that Hegel, unlike Kant, (a) is able to claim that not everything in natural organisms is purposive, and (b) provide a philosophical, and not merely empirical, account of the distinction between plants and animals. In both of these respects, Hegel's position can be seen as a welcome advance over Kant.
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 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.