Chapter 14 - Is There a Future for the Philosophy of Nature?

Summary

Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is integrated into the fabric of his system. We absorb into our thinking the concepts and relationships that have survived the successes and failures of experience (Phenomenology). Through disciplined thought we articulate the internal logic of those concepts (Logic). By working out what the world beyond thought would be like, seeing how the world instantiates those expectations, and then building those discoveries into our next ventures, we develop a systematic picture of the stages of natural complexity and human functioning (Philosophies of Nature and Spirit). Since Hegel’s time, however, we have discovered that nature has a history; time and space are no longer absolutes; the discoveries of science have expanded in both breadth and detail; and our comprehensive explanations for the way the world functions are continually being falsified by the discovery of new facts. A philosophy of nature, then, needs to reshape the way reason functions. Adopting the strategies we use to solve problems and that science uses to develop and test hypotheses, we broaden our perspective to cover multiple domains in nature and search for patterns that show how and why they fit together as they do.