Online research in philosophy

John Burbidge shows that, far from incorporating everything into an all-consuming necessity, Hegel's philosophy requires the novelty of unexpected contingencies to maintain its systematic pretensions. To know without fear of failure is to expect that experience will confound our confident claims to knowledge. And the universal character of all life involves acting, discovering what happens as a result, and incorporating both intention and result into a new comprehensive understanding. Burbidge explores how Hegel applied this approach when he turned from his (...) logic to chemistry, biology, psychology and history, and suggests how a Hegelian might function within the changed circumstances of contemporary science. (shrink)

In order to answer the debate whether Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is just an extension of his logic (Halper and Winfield) or combines thought with its other (Maker), this paper considers what Hegel writes about chemism (in the logic) and about chemical process (in the philosophy of nature). The logical argument can be constructed without reference to experience, from paradoxes that emerge within an original concept. In the philosophy of nature, however, an initial concept is analyzed, but its instantiation reflects (...) nature’s “impotence”: unrelated processes, fours and twos rather than threes, and so on. The singular conclusion combines universal conceptual framework and particular natural processes into a new, non-logical concept. (shrink)