The Owl of Minerva

Volume 34, Issue 1, Fall/Winter 2002

Chemism and Chemistry

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.