The purpose of this research is to examine Hegel's philosophy of science. The plan of the research will be to set forth the intellectual and historical context in which such a philosophy can be discerned, and then to discuss the focus, details, and construct of Hegel's approach to science as discipline and as mode of thought, with a view toward elucidating the principal foundation on which primary elements of his philosophy may be based.
To appreciate the importance of Hegel's philosophy of science, one may usefully be encouraged to note the circumstances of its emergence. Findlay refers to Hegel as a German Romantic, (Findlay, 1977, p. xxv) and Hegel was either an exact or just younger contemporary of such Enlightenment and Romantic philosophers as Hume and Kant. He lived in the important transitional years that saw the dissolution of absolute monarchy as the typical continental state form in France. This was the period of the American and French Revolutions, as well as the Reign of Terror, the rise and not yet the fall of Napoleon, and the growth of German influence in European politics owing to French imperial ambitions on the continent. Mozart and Beethoven were composing during Hegel's lifetime, and Beethoven was making the transition from classical to Romantic musical forms. This positioning of Hegel in intellectual history, and of that history as an aspect of political and social history, is important because Hegel's approach to philosophy, or what he called speculative philosophy, as the overriding intellectual discipline, was informed by immediate knowledge of the historiography of the period.
The transition from eighteenth- to nineteenth-century philosophical perspective is also the period of the birth of German's idealism. In this regard, Marcuse (Marcuse, 1969, p. 3) refers to Hegel, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling as German idealists, and he sets forth the cultural context in which Hegel's thought system emerge...