Reason Observing Nature

Cinzia Ferrini shows that Hegel’s central concern is to expose the contradiction between reason’s belief and its actual procedure in scientific knowledge. In empirical sciences, reason in fact rises conceptually above the diversity of the sensible when it seeks to identufy laws, forces, purified chemical matters, and genera. Ferrini retraces Hegel’s objections to description, classification, and the qust for laws in contemporaneous mineralogical, biological, psychological and phrenological lterature, showing how Hegel both accounted for the methodological self-consciousness of working scientists and took active part in debates between rival scientific theories, publicly siding with some lines of contemporaneous natural science against others and providing for them a speculative justification and foundation. Ferrini shows that natural science and our understanding of natural science are central to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and to his critique of Kant and Schelling.