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Carsten König
Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature – Renewing the Speculative Idea


Abstract

One can say that the present situation of the natural sciences and their knowledge are deeply ambivalent: On the one hand it is justified to underline that the progress made in describing the nature and the cosmos, their function and the results achieved are overwhelming, but on the other hand the metaphysical price to pay is a fragmentation of knowledge since the 19th century, i.e. no system provides orientation for emerging questions of social or religious importance.

So, it appears that highly specialized branches of empirical science are missing a systematical center which could provide a theoretical background to interpret their concrete results. Not only appropriate theological explanations are missing, but also an independent philosophia naturalis, refusing to be the maidservant of science.

It can be argued prima facie that a transdisciplinary approach could methodological restore this missing perspective – but an uncritical usage of this term poses more questions like: what does this notion of transdisciplinary approach fully implies, how could its application be justified?

My thesis – in brief – is that a kind of revived idealism, namely in the tradition of HEGEL, could explore this challenge from a deeper perspective which might avoid this abyss of an open foundation: The problematical coordination of empirical science ("Verstandeswissenschaft") and philosophy of nature ("Vernunftwissenschaft") could turn out to be the key distinction to understand this challenge of reintegrate both aspects of reality – empirical and non-empirical knowledge.

Released with a remarkable translation and commentary of Hegels Philosophy of Nature by Michael John PETRY, and the studies of some more philosophers like Ken FOLDES, philosophical thinking has turned back to Hegel. In the last decades of the 20th century one can state the fertile cooperation between science of nature and an idealistic inspired philosophy of nature. For example: by showing that the natural laws - i.e. the constitution of the nature as an inherent lawful unit - can be considered as the essence ("Wesen") of the nature which refers to the eternal and timeless logic, some idealistic arguments are pleading for a rethinking of this tradition, if we want to avoid ad-
hoc postulates.

Assuming that the idealist concept of nature and the human spirit – the philosophy of the real – might pose an alternative to rethink the present state of our knowledge and its questions, I will enter some passages from Hegel and comment their intention, in particular §§ 79 to 82 of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. In nuce - because the final prove must be the following system of the developping idea - one could find here something like the core of Hegelian thinking. Why and how must the sciencifical use of reason ("Verstand") be lifted up ("Aufhebung") into a dialectical and speculative moment? What do we gain with the discovering of this hierarchy of thinking?

Hegel didn‘t deny the importance of empirical research, he even stressed out that the results of empirical science are the conditio sine qua non for deep speculative thinking.

Biography
Carsten , born 20th of november 1973 in Krefeld, Germany, has studied philosophy, political science and jurisprudence at the universities of Jena and Hagen, Germany. He has achieved the Master of Arts in 2003. The degree dissertation examined the notion of international law in the kantian and hegelian thinking.

Since 2005 he follows a doctoral program at the university of Freiburg, Germany, examining the speculative methode in the hegelian philosophy of nature. His tutor is professor Ms. Regine Kather.

Carsten König works as office clerk for the fine art publisher Achenbach + Costa, Düsseldorf, Germany.

He is married with Magali Desse-König and has a daughter, Mathilde Esther König.


 

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