The Logic of Hegel

CHAPTER II.

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY AND HEGEL.

Today in England, philosophy is either ignored entirely or reduced to the level of a specialized branch of science; if not that, it is treated as a collection of principles shared by all the sciences. The preferred term for research into subjects once considered the proper domain of philosophy is now Mental and Moral Science This was the common 19th-century academic term for what we now call Psychology and Ethics.. In certain circles, the old name "philosophy" is restricted to the vague and irregular speculations of thinkers who either lived before the rise of exact science or who worked in defiance of its rules and examples.

One large and influential group of English thinkers is inclined to sweep philosophy away entirely, viewing it as synonymous with "metaphysics" and obsolete errors. Upon the empty space left behind, they are constructing a body of psychological facts, or they are trying to organize and codify general observations on scientific methods, which are known as Inductive Logic A system of reasoning that moves from specific observations to general laws, popularized by John Stuart Mill.. A smaller, but no less energetic, class of philosophers views their work as an extension and completion of science—as the total unification of knowledge. The first group is the school best known by the names of Mr. J. S. Mill and Mr. Bain; the second is the doctrine of Mr. Herbert Spencer.

If we look at history, it is immediately clear that philosophy has always had a great deal to do with science. In their early stages, these two ways of thinking were hardly distinguishable. The philosophers of Ionia and Magna Graecia Ionia (in modern-day Turkey) and Magna Graecia (Southern Italy) were the birthplaces of Western philosophy and science in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE. were also the scientific teachers of their era. Their surviving fragments occasionally remind us of modern theories in geology and biology, while at other times they reflect the teachings of idealism. The same is relatively true for the early philosophers of Modern Europe. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in spite of...