ABSTRACT
The virtual extinction of the philosophy of nature is not simply a result of the rise of empirical science as a vaunted paradigm of knowledge. The radical demands of a systematic conception of nature provide a preliminary guide for understanding and evaluating G. W. F. Hegel's initial efforts to determine nature in the opening arguments of his philosophy of nature. Space, time and place provide no basis for connecting one point rather than another to its adjacent counterparts, making one motion more actual than any other possible alternative. Matter and its diremption into bodies must itself be constituted, which hardly can occur on the basis of space alone. If the philosophy of nature is to regain respectability, it must follow the path of conceiving nature without foundations, leaving behind the fast and loose adventures of its metaphysical and transcendental past. Nature must be determined without appealing to anything assumed to be given in reality.
