ABSTRACT
The transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature has generally been regarded as a major difficulty in Hegel’s system. The actual world, it is felt, and empirical scientific knowledge about it are irreducibly non-logical and cannot be derived from pure thought alone. There is, however, room for doubt about the nature of Hegel’s enterprise. To what extent did he believe that features of the empirical world can be derived from logic? There are at least four possibilities here:
(i) Hegel did not wish to make any a priori claims about the world at all, except perhaps that there must be some world or other and that it must display the sort of general hierarchical structure that can be termed ‘dialectical’. The concepts presented in the Logic are otherwise selected only because they are the concepts which we have found to be required by our empirical discoveries about the world. The Philosophy of Nature does no more than organize the results of the sciences in the framework provided by the Logic. It does not purport to supply any logical or a priori support for them. Hegel’s enterprise is, on this view, that of systematic reflection on the findings of the special sciences. We might question some features of his execution of it, and it would of course have to be revised in the light of scientific developments since his time. But there is no radical problem about the transition from logic to nature.1
