John W. Burbidge: 'Real Process. How Logic and Chemistry Combine in Hegel's Philosophy',

摘要

Hegel's philosophy of nature and in par-ticular his philosophy of the chemical process seemed to be antiquated soon af-ter its appearance. Some of his state-ments were picked out and exposed as grotesque mistakes. This led to the bad reputation of the idealistic philosophy of nature and to the opinion that idealistic speculative thought should have no rele-vance to a science such as chemistry and could at best be regarded as an outdated historical curiosity. Not only natural sci-entists who principally opposed philoso-phy of nature but also philosophers who reproduced and paraphrased the obscure passages in Hegel's Science of Logic and Encyclopaedia contributed to that bad reputation. It was not before the 1970s that the prejudice against Hegel's puta-tive incompetence in the natural sciences of his time was removed. In 1976, von Engelhardt published his pioneering book H egel und die Chemie