Hegel and the Sciences

INTRODUCTION Though it was initiated by Pythagoras, expanded in Plato's Timeaus , comprehensively developed by Aristotle, and healthy throughout the Mediaeval, Renaissance and Modern periods well into the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century among analytic and scientifically minded philosophers, “philosophy of nature” apparently vanished. Fortunately, the increasing calibre of recent research in history, methodology and philosophy of science has once again revealed fascinating issues at the intersections among the natural sciences, scientific methodology, history of science, and philosophy of science, which today - precisely because no discipline can plausibly monopolize them - are rightly designated philosophy of nature. Placing Hegel's notorious Philosophy of Nature within this interdisciplinary area does not yet illumine it. Hegel classifies his philosophy of nature as rational physics. “Rational physics” may sound quaint, outdated, and even presumptuous. However, Newton identified the genre of the Principia as “rational mechanics” (a proper part of rational physics), and rational physics remains a serious discipline today, with professional journals and recent textbooks to show for it. “Rational physics” is physical theory which emphasizes the conceptual foundations and basic principles of physics and how these can be used to explain particular physical phenomena, rendering them comprehensible. This is the key aim of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature , because sufficient analysis of the conceptual foundations of natural sciences requires philosophical resources which complement the resources found within scientific theories and methods, which alone, he argues, are insufficient to the task.

Having studied Hegel's philosophy, as it is epitomized in the Encyclopaedia, many scholars would be in agreement with David G Ritchie who, in his book on Darwin and Hegel (1893), remarked: “Everywhere in Hegel we read about Entwickelung; but of Evolution he does not speak in so friendly a manner.” Bearing in mind the distinction between “Entwicklung” (“development”) and “evolution” and recalling Hegel's criticism of conceptions of natural evolution in the initial section of the Philosophy of Nature, it is certainly not immediately evident why a serious scholar like John N Findlay should maintain that “if any philosopher is a philosopher of evolution, that philosopher is Hegel.”It can hardly be denied, however, that more recent studies in Hegel's philosophy can be used to support Findlay's statement to a certain extent. Not only has the relevance of Hegel's philosophy for an adequate understanding of organic life and its evolution been strongly emphasized; it has even been asserted that Hegel had at his disposal a concept of evolution essentially determining the methodic approach of his philosophy of nature.Now I would not venture to ascertain whether or not Hegel's concept of evolution is of present relevance for our understanding of nature and even less would I dare to decide on the hypothetical question whether or not Hegel, if he “had lived a little later, … would have given us an evolutionary, teleological theory of Nature as he did of mind in history.” In my paper, I would like to deal with a subject matter of more limited scope. Discussions concerning the systematic importance and present relevance of Hegel's concept of evolution tend to be somewhat vague and abstract as long as the meaning of “evolution” in Hegel's philosophy is anything but unequivocal. Therefore, I am going to attempt to outline a systematic reconstruction of the function of Hegel's concept of evolution within the conceptual framework of Hegel's encyclopaedic Philosophy of Nature. More precisely, I will try to elucidate: 1) the question whether or not Hegel's criticism of philosophic and scientific concepts of evolution led him to his own positive concept of evolution; 2) the question in what sense a specific Hegelian concept of evolution is relevant for the understanding of the notional development taking place between the logical “absolute Idea” and “subjective spirit”.

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBrooke Abounader is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. She studies the role of representational inaccuracy in scientific modeling.Anna Akasoy, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oriental Institute at Oxford, specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the medieval Muslim West, contacts between the Islamic world and other cultures, and the role of Islamic history and culture in modern political debates in Western Europe.Garland E. Allen is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. He has a special interest in the history of genetics (and eugenics), evolution, and embryology and their interactions in the first half of the twentieth century.Casper Andersen is an assistant professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His main area of research is history of science, technology, and empires. His publications include the monograph British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914 (2011), and he is coediting the forthcoming five-volume collection British Governance and Administration in Africa, 1880–1940 (2013).Warwick Anderson is Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Johns Hopkins, 2008) and coeditor of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Postcolonial Sovereignties (Duke, 2011). His current research explores the global history of scientific investigations of race mixing in the twentieth century.Peder Anker is an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and in the Environmental Studies Program at New York University. His works include Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), and From Bauhaus to Eco-House: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press, 2010). See www.pederanker.com.Ross Bassett is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. He is working on a history of Indians who studied at MIT.Jakob Bek-Thomsen has a postdoctoral position at the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. He has recently finished his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Nicolaus Steno and the Making of an Early Modern Career: Nature, Knowledge, and Networks at the Court of the Medici, 1657–1672.” He is currently working on the emergence of finance and its connections with natural philosophy and religion in the early modern period.Jim Bennett is Director of the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. His research interests lie in the history of instruments, of practical mathematics, and of astronomy.Marvin Bolt, Director of the Webster Institute at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, is authoring the Adler's Optical Instruments catalogue. He served on the editorial team of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, studies the Herschel family, and researches the history of the telescope, early seventeenth-century examples in particular.Christian Bonah is Professor for the History of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Strasbourg and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has worked on comparative history of medical education, the history of medicaments, and the history of human experimentation. Recent work includes research on risk perception and management in drug scandals as well as studies on medical films.Sonja Brentjes is currently a researcher in a “project of excellence” sponsored by the Junta of Andalusia at the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and History of Science of the University of Seville. She publishes on three major topics: Arabic and Persian versions of Euclid's Elements, the mathematical sciences at madrasas in Islamic societies before 1700, and cross-cultural exchange of knowledge in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.Thomas Broman is Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests include eighteenth-century science and medicine, and he is currently writing a survey of science in the Enlightenment.Massimo Bucciantini is Professor of History of Science at the University of Siena. He is coeditor, with Michele Camerota, of Galilaeana: Journal of Galileo Studies. His publications include Galileo e Keplero (Einaudi, 2003; Les Belles Lettres, 2008), Italo Calvino e la scienza (Donzelli, 2007), and Auschwitz Experiment (Einaudi, 2011).Andrew J. Butrica, a former Chercheur Associé at the Centre de Recherches en Histoire des Sciences et Techniques in Paris, has published extensively on space history and has earned the Leopold Prize of the Organization of American Historians and the Robinson Prize of the National Council on Public History.Stefano Caroti is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Parma. His research interests include late medieval philosophy, particularly late scholastic debates on natural philosophy at the University of Paris.Chu Pingyi is a Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He has published widely on appropriations of Jesuit science and natural philosophy by their Chinese readers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China.J. T. H. Connor is John Clinch Professor of Medical Humanities and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada. He is currently coeditor of the McGill-Queen's University Press History of Health, Medicine, and Society series. His latest book, a collection of essays coedited with Stephan Curtis entitled Medicine in the Remote and Rural North, 1800–2000, was published in 2011 by Pickering & Chatto in the Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine series.Scott DeGregorio is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. He specializes in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Latin literature, with a special focus on the Bible and its interpretation. He has published widely on the writings of Bede, most recently editing The Cambridge Companion to Bede.Michael Dettelbach has published widely on Alexander von Humboldt and is generally interested in science and culture in the revolutionary and Romantic eras. He directs Corporate and Foundation Relations at Boston University.Nadja Durbach is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah. She is the author of Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England and Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture. She is now working on a book about beef, citizenship, and identity in modern Britain.David Edgerton is the Hans Rausing Professor, Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Imperial College London. His most recent book is Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2011; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University. Her publications include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (California, 1994), and she has a long-standing interest in the relations between knowledge and faith in the age of Galileo.Maurice A. Finocchiaro is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His latest books are The Essential Galileo (Hackett, 2008) and Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 280) (Springer, 2010). He is now working on the Routledge Guidebook to Galileo's Dialogue.Mike Fortun is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the author of Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation (University of California Press, 2008).Stephen Gaukroger is Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Among his recent publications are The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210 to 1685 (Oxford University Press, 2005), and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680 to 1760 (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is now at work on the third volume in this series: The Naturalization of the Human and the Humanization of Nature: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1750 to 1825.Thomas F. Glick is Professor of History at Boston University. His two research fields are medieval technology (irrigation systems, water mills) and modern science (Darwin, Freud, and Einstein).Susana Gómez is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is a specialist in seventeenth-century Italian science, with particular interests in atomism and experimental science. Much of her current work concerns issues about the representation of nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Frederick Gregory is Emeritus Professor of History of Science at the University of Florida. His research has dealt with the history of science and religion and with German science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is currently engaged in writing a biography of the nineteenth-century Moravian physicist-philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries.David E. Hahm is Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University. He is the author of The Origins of Stoic Cosmology and articles on Greek and Roman intellectual and cultural history, especially Hellenistic philosophy and historiography.Minghui Hu served as an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago from 2003 to 2005. He joined the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2005 and is now completing his book manuscript Cosmopolitan Confucians: The Passage to Modern Chinese Thought.Jeffrey Allan Johnson, Professor of History at Villanova University, has published mainly on the social and institutional history of chemical science and technology in modern Germany. Recently he was guest editor for Ambix, 2011, 58(2), a special issue on “Chemistry in the Aftermath of World Wars.”Jessica Keating is a Solmsen Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is writing a book entitled The Machinations of German Court Culture: Early Modern Automata.Peter C. Kjærgaard is Professor of Evolutionary Studies at Aarhus University. He has published widely in the history of modern science, including books on Wittgenstein and the sciences, the history of universities, and the history of science in Denmark. His current research focuses on the history and popular understanding of human evolution.David Knight has taught history of science at Durham University in England since 1964 and is a past President of the British Society for the History of Science. He published The Making of Modern Science in 2009 (Polity) and is writing a book on the Scientific Revolution.Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University, where he is Director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies. He is also the Editor of the History of Science Society's flagship journal, Isis. His most recent publications include Victorian Popularizers of Science, Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain, and Science in the Marketplace (coedited with Aileen Fyfe). He is also general editor of a monograph series titled “Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century” published by Pickering & Chatto. He is currently working on a biography of John Tyndall and is one of the editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall.Pamela O. Long is a historian of late medieval/early modern history of science and technology. She is the coeditor and coauthor of The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript (MIT Press, 2009). Her books include Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (Oregon State University Press, 2011). She is at work on a history of engineering and knowledge in late sixteenth-century Rome.Morris Low is an associate professor of Japanese history at the University of Queensland, where he is Acting Head of the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies. He coedited a special issue of Historia Scientiarum (2011, 21[1]), and his recent books include Japan on Display (2006).Christine MacLeod is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism, and British Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988).Paolo Mancosu is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main areas of interest are mathematical logic and history and philosophy of mathematics and logic. His current work is focused on the philosophy of mathematical practice. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow (2008) and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (2009).Hannah Marcus is a doctoral student studying history and the history of science at Stanford University. She is interested in the relationship between intellectual and religious culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.David Meskill is an assistant professor of history at Dowling College on Long Island. His book Optimizing the German Workforce: Labor Administration from Bismarck to the Economic Miracle was published by Berghahn Books in 2010.John Pickstone is Wellcome Research Professor in the University of Manchester Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. His publications include Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Manchester University Press, 2000) and The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences, Volume 6 of the Cambridge History of Science (edited with Peter Bowler) (Cambridge University Press, 2009).Matthias Rieger is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology, Leibniz University, Hannover, and the author of Helmholtz Musicus: Die Objektivierung der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert durch Helmholtz' Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).Joy Rohde is Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio. Her research focuses on Cold War social science and politics. She is completing a book, under contract with Cornell University Press, titled The Social Scientists' War: Knowledge, Statecraft, and Democracy in the Era of Containment.William G. Rothstein is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of several books on American medical history, most recently Public Health and the Risk Factor (2003).Lisa T. Sarasohn is Professor of History at Oregon State University. Her latest publication is The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution (Johns Hopkins, 2010). She is working on a cultural history of insects in early modern England.Arne Schirrmacher teaches history of science at the Humboldt University in Berlin and is currently on leave at the University of California, Berkeley. His research concerns the history of the modern mathematical sciences, in particular quantum theory, the history of scientific socialization within student groups in Germany since 1850, and science communication in twentieth-century Europe.Petra G. Schmidl specialized in premodern astronomy in Islamic societies. Since 2009, she has worked as a research assistant at the University of Bonn. With Eva Orthmann and Mo˙hammad Karīmī Zanjānī A˙sl, she is investigating the Dustūr al-Munajjimīn as a source for the history of the Ismāʿīliyya and their astronomical and astrological concepts.Charlotte Schubert is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Leipzig. Her publications include Anacharsis der Weise: Nomade, Skythe, Grieche (2010), Der hippokratische Eid (2005), Hippokrates (coedited, 2006), and Frauenmedizin in der Antike (coedited, 1999).Vera Schwach is a historian and senior researcher at the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research, and Higher Education (NIFU). She has published analyses in science policy and has written extensively on the history of marine science, especially on fisheries biology and the management of sea fisheries in the Nordic countries and in Europe.Jonathan Seitz is an assistant teaching professor of history at Drexel University. He is particularly interested in vernacular ideas about nature and the supernatural in early modern Europe. His book, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press.Helaine Selin is Science Librarian and Faculty Associate in the School of Natural Sciences at Hampshire College. Her work includes editing The Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (Springer, 2008) and the series Science Across Cultures. Happiness Across Cultures is due out in Spring 2012.Efram Sera-Shriar received his Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. He is now working as a research associate on the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, organized by Montana State University and York University in Toronto.Asif A. Siddiqi is an associate professor of history at Fordham University. His most recent book is The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is now writing a book on the effects of the Stalinist purges on Soviet science and technology.Mark G. Spencer is Associate Professor of History at Brock University. His book, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (University of Rochester Press, 2005), was issued in a paperback edition in 2010. He is also current President of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society.Matthew Stanley is an associate professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he teaches and researches the history and philosophy of science. He is the author of Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington (Chicago, 2007), and he is now completing a manuscript on the history of science and religion in the Victorian period.John Steele is Associate Professor of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University. His recent publications include A Brief Introduction to Astronomy in the Middle East (Saqi Books, 2008) and Ancient Astronomical Observations and the Study of the Moon's Motion (1691–1757) (Springer, 2012). He is currently working on an edition and commentary of a newly discovered astrological compendium from Babylon.Larry Stewart is Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan. He is editing a book on the uses of humans in experiment and writing a study of experiment in the Enlightenment and the first industrial revolution.Bert Theunissen is Professor of the History of Science at the Institute for History and Foundations of Science, affiliated with the Descartes Centre for the History of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His current work focuses on the history of animal breeding, particularly on the interactions between scientific and practical workers in livestock breeding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For his publications see http://www.descartescentre.com.Carsten Timmermann is a lecturer at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on issues in the history of modern medicine and biology, including chronic disease, cancer research, and pharmaceuticals.The Rev. Jeffrey P. von Arx, S.J., became the eighth President of Fairfield University in 2004. A historian by discipline, he is the author of numerous articles as well as the books Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard University Press, 1985) and Varieties of Ultramontanism (Catholic University Press, 1998). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.Michael Worboys is Director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester. He specializes in the history of infectious diseases as well as the application of research in clinical practices. He has recently started new work on dog breeding, feeding, training, and welfare from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. His publications include Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000 (with Neil Pemberton), and Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 103, Number 2June 2012 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/666369 © 2012 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Notes on Contributors

Philosophy, Science, and History is an anthology, consisting mostly of excerpts from important texts in philosophy of science. Some of these texts were written in the tradition of philosophy of science as a discipline. However, most of them come from older times when there was not much of a separation between science and philosophy and reflecting about science was a way of doing science—the tradition known as natural philosophy. The book contains a total of 29 chapters, the first of which is a general introduction, and the remaining 28 are grouped in two parts, each with a brief summary presenting the themes discussed. The first part, ‘‘Approaches to the History and Philosophy of Science’’, aims at presenting classical twentieth-century approaches to philosophy of science. It contains an introduction by the editor and texts by George Santayana, Carl Hempel, Hans Reichenbach, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Martin Rudwick, and Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer. It focuses on philosophical reflections about science in the debate between the logical and methodological, and the historical and sociological approaches. The second part draws attention to earlier periods of philosophy and history of science; it is divided into three sections (A, B, and C), each devoted to a different debate, and each containing an introduction by the editor. Section A is entitled ‘‘Hypotheses in Scientific Discovery’’, bringing texts by John Stuart Mill, William Whewell, Pierre Duhem, and Norwood Russell Hanson; its theme is the relation between scientific hypotheses and inductive reasoning, in such a way that Hanson’s text appears as the peak of the tradition of investigation on the processes that lead to the formulation of scientific theories. Section B discusses ‘‘Force in Natural Philosophy’’, presenting texts by Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, Emilie du Châtelet, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Those texts raise numerous discussions, but the Editor’s Introduction to this section directs the reader through the matters of force and causality in classical physics. And in section C one finds some important features of the debate between catastrophism and uniformitarianism in geology and its

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Recent years have seen new systematic interest in Hegel's philosophical conception of the physical universe. It has become clear that Hegel's account of nature is revealing both on its own as well as by providing a non-naturalist understanding of the place of mind in nature. This Element focuses on the very foundations and method of Hegel's philosophy of nature, relating them to Newtonian and to modern physics. The volume also sheds light on Hegel's global account of the physical universe as a material space-time system and on his ecological conception of the Earth as a habitable planet populated by organic life. By drawing connections to relativity theory and earth systems science it is shown that Hegel's conception of nature is very much philosophically alive and can complement scientific accounts of nature in illuminating ways.

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsCorrections to this articleErrataPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTina Adcock received her Ph.D. from the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. She specializes in the history of science, exploration, and travel in the modern North American Arctic.Gerardo Aldana is Professor of Anthropology and [email protected] at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His interests broadly consider the sciences of ancient Mesoamerica but focus on the astronomy recorded in Mayan hieroglyphic texts. He is working on the historical contextualization of scientific discovery within the Dresden Codex Venus Table.Gerardo Aldana is Professor of Anthropology and [email protected] at UCSB. His interests broadly consider the sciences of ancient Mesoamerica, but focus on the astronomy recorded in Mayan hieroglyphic texts. He is currently working on the historical contextualization of scientific discovery within the Dresden Codex Venus Table.Brian Balmer is Professor of Science Policy Studies in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London. His research interests combine historical and sociological approaches and include the history of chemical and biological warfare, the history of the “brain drain,” and the role of volunteers in biomedical research.Trevor Barnes is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His research interests are in the history of twentieth-century geographical thought.Richard H. Beyler teaches history of science, intellectual history, and German history at Portland State University in Oregon. His research focuses on the political history of scientific institutions in twentieth-century Germany and on the history of biophysics before the rise of molecular biology.Karin Bijsterveld, a historian, is a professor in the Department of Technology and Society Studies at Maastricht University. She is the coeditor (with Trevor Pinch) of The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford, 2012) and the author of Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (MIT, 2008).Francesca Bordogna is Associate Professor in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also a fellow of the Reilly Center for the History and Philosophy of Science. She is the author of William James at the Boundaries (Chicago, 2008) and is now working on a book on pragmatism in early twentieth-century Italy.Anastasios Brenner is Professor of Philosophy at the Université Paul Valéry—Montpellier 3. His research focuses on the history of philosophy of science, mainly on the French tradition, as well as the current relevance of historical epistemology. His most recent book is Raison scientifique et valeurs humaines (Presses Universitaires de France, 2011).Sonja Brentjes is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. Her areas of research are the history of science, cartography, and institutions and cross-cultural exchange of knowledge in Islamicate societies and the Mediterranean world (8th–17th centuries).John Hedley Brooke is Professor Emeritus of Science and Religion at Oxford University. He has published extensively on history of chemistry, Victorian science, and the historical relations between science and religion. His latest book, edited with Ronald Numbers, is Science and Religion around the World (Oxford, 2011).Mark B. Brown is a professor in the Department of Government at California State University, Sacramento. He is the author of Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation (MIT Press, 2009), as well as various publications on the politics of expertise, citizen participation, bioethics, climate change, and related topics.Stephen T. Casper ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Clarkson University. His research focuses on the history of neurology, neuroscience, and physiology, topics on which he has published two books as well as several articles, essays, and reviews.Pratik Chakrabarti, Reader in History at the University of Kent, has published widely on history of science, medicine, and imperialism. His works include Materials and Medicine: Trade, Conquest, and Therapeutics in the Eighteenth Century and Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics. He is an editor of Social History of Medicine.Cristina Chimisso (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/philosophy/chimisso.shtml) is Senior Lecturer in European Studies and Philosophy at the Open University, United Kingdom. She is the author of Writing the History of the Mind: Philosophy and Science in France, 1900 to 1960s (Ashgate, 2008), and Gaston Bachelard: Critic of Science and the Imagination (Routledge, 2001).Deborah R. Coen is an associate professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the author, most recently, of The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (University of Chicago Press, 2013).Claudine Cohen, a philosopher and historian of earth and life sciences, holds professorships in science at the EPHE (Life and Earth Science Section) and in the humanities at the EHESS (Center for Language and Arts) in Paris. Her publications include Science, libertinage et clandestinité à l'aube des Lumières: Le transformisme de Telliamed (Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), La méthode de Zadig: La trace, le fossile, la preuve (Seuil, 2011), The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myths, and History (Chicago, 2002), and the first translation of Leibniz's Protogaea (with André Wakefield [Chicago, 2008]). In 2012 she was awarded the Eugen Wegmann Prize of the French Geological Society for her work in the history of geosciences.Roger Cooter is Honorary Professor in the Department of History at University College London. His latest book, Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine (Yale, 2013), was written with Claudia Stein. With her he is now working on a study of capitalism, biopolitics, and hygiene in Germany and Britain from the late nineteenth century.Andrew Ede is a historian of science specializing in history of chemistry. He is the Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program and also teaches in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.Michael Egan (McMaster University) is the author of Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (MIT Press, 2007). He is especially interested in the toxic century and is now at work on a global history of mercury pollution since World War II.Roger Emerson is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario, where he taught from 1964 to 1999. He is known for studies of the Scottish Enlightenment. His latest book, published in 2013, is a biography of an amateur scientist, improver, and politician: Archibald Campbell, third Duke of Argyll (1682–1761).Sterling Evans holds the Louise Welsh Chair in Southern Plains and Borderlands History at the University of Oklahoma. His research interests include environmental history, agricultural history, and borderlands history of North America and Latin America. He is the author of The Green Republic (1999) and Bound in Twine (2007).Paul Lawrence Farber is Oregon State University Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He does research on the history of natural history, racism, and evolution. His most recent book is Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas (2011).Steve Fuller holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick. He has authored more than twenty books, with two appearing in 2014: The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism (with Veronika Lipinska) and Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History.Alan Gabbey is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Barnard College, Columbia University. He is completing a book on Spinoza (Oxford University Press) and working on a book on mechanical philosophy in the early modern period.Cathy Gere is Associate Professor of History of Science at the University of California, San Diego. She is now working on a book about utilitarianism and the sciences of pain and pleasure.Pamela Gossin, Professor of History of Science and Literary Studies and the Director of Medical and Scientific Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, is writing two essays on nineteenth-century British literature and astronomy and creating a digital archive of the correspondence and scientific and literary essays of John G. Neihardt.Jean-Baptiste Gouyon is a science and technology scholar with a deep interest in the history of science in its public contexts. His research focuses on film, television, and museums as popular scientific media. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of York.Rich Hamerla is Associate Dean of the Honors College and Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma. In addition to his work in the history of chemistry, he teaches classes on Weapons of Mass Destruction and science and the Cold War and has publications addressing biological weapons.Darin Hayton is Associate Professor of the History of Science at Haverford College.John Henry is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Edinburgh. He recently published a collection of earlier research, Religion, Magic, and the Origins of Science in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2012), and an introductory textbook, A Short History of Scientific Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).Noah Heringman is Professor of English at the University of Missouri. His publications include Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (2004) and Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work (2013).Hunter Heyck is Associate Professor of the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma, where—much to his surprise—he has recently become department chair. His second book, The Age of System: The Rise and Fracture of High Modern Social Science, has just been accepted for publication by Johns Hopkins University Press.Jan P. Hogendijk is a professor of the history of mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Utrecht. His research interests are the history of the mathematical sciences in ancient Greek and medieval Islamic civilizations and the history of mathematics in the Netherlands between 1600 and 1850.Thierry Hoquet is Professor of Philosophy of Science in the Philosophy Faculty, University of Lyon 3, and a Junior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He specializes in the history of the life sciences, from Buffon to Darwin. He is currently completing a study on the way sex is variously defined by biologists.David A. Hounshell is Roderick Professor of Technology and Social Change at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932 (1984), and “Planning and Executing ‘Automation’ at Ford Motor Company, 1945–1965: The Cleveland Engine Plant and Its Consequences,” in Fordism Transformed: The Development of Production Methods in the Automobile Industry, edited by Haruhito Shiomi and Kazuo Wada (Oxford, 1995).James Hull is an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia (Kelowna) and an affiliate of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (Toronto). He is Editor of Scientia Canadensis, the journal of the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association.Georgia Irby is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the College of William and Mary. Her research interests include the history of Greek and Roman science and the representation of science, broadly defined, in nonscientific Greco-Roman literature.Douglas M. Jesseph is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Berkeley's Philosophy of Mathematics, Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis, and numerous articles on mathematics, methodology, and philosophy in the early modern period.Andrew Jewett is Associate Professor of History and of Social Studies at Harvard University and the author of Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge, 2012). He is currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center.Ann Johnson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. She works on the history of the physical sciences, engineering, technology, and modern Europe. Her most recent book was: Hitting the Brakes: Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge (Duke, 2009)Paul Josephson teaches history at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and is the author of the forthcoming Building a Soviet Arctic.Horst Kant studied physics, history, and philosophy of science. Since 1995 he has been a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. His main subjects are history of physics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (especially institutional, social, and biographical aspects) and history of atomic physics.Peter P. Kirschenmann is Professor Emeritus in the Philosophy of the Natural Sciences and Philosophical Ethics at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. He has worked on a great variety of philosophical topics; a selection of his published articles can be found in his Science, Nature, and Ethics: Critical Philosophical Studies (Delft: Eburon, 2001).W. R. Laird is Associate Professor of History at Carleton University, Ottawa, where he teaches medieval history and the history of science. He is the author of The Unfinished Mechanics of Giuseppe Moletti (Toronto, 2000) and coeditor (with Sophie Roux) of Mechanics and Natural Philosophy before the Scientific Revolution (Dordrecht, 2008).Christoph Lüthy directs the Center for the History of Philosophy and Science at Radboud University, Nijmegen. He is particularly interested in the history of natural philosophy and of scientific iconography. In 2012 he published David Gorlaeus (1591–1612): An Enigmatic Figure in the History of Philosophy and Science (Amsterdam University Press).Robert MacDougall is Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario and the author of The People's Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age.Lisa Messeri is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a Ph.D. from MIT's Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society. She is completing a manuscript entitled Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds.Robert G. Morrison is Associate Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College. He is the author of Islam and Science: The Intellectual Career of Ni˙zām al-Dīn al-Nīsābūrī (Routledge, 2007).Stephanie Moser is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Southampton. She has published widely on the visual representation of archaeology and the portrayal and reception of the ancient world.Adriana Novoa is a cultural historian whose specialty is science in Latin America. She and Alex Levine have coauthored two books about Darwinism in Argentina (From Man to Monkey and Darwinistas!). Her articles have been published in the Journal of Latin American Studies in Context, the Latinoamericanist, Revista Hispánica Moderna, and elsewhere.Benjamin B. Olshin is Associate Professor of Philosophy, History of Science and Technology, and Design at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. His research areas include the history of cartography and exploration, ancient science and engineering, the philosophy of contemporary physics, and traditional modes of knowledge transmission.John Parascandola taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before serving as Chief of the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine and as Public Health Service Historian. He is the author of The Development of American Pharmacology: John J. Abel and the Shaping of a Discipline.Valentina Pugliano is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a Junior Research Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge. Her work focuses on early modern artisanal practices and the interaction between medicine and science in the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Levant.Nicky Reeves is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, where he is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project “The Board of Longitude, 1714–1828: Science, Innovation, and Empire in the Georgian World,” conducted in association with the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.Raul Rojas is a professor of computer science in Berlin. He is the founder of the Konrad Zuse Internet Archive, the largest online source of documents and blueprints written or drafted by Konrad Zuse. He is the author of Die Rechenmaschinen von Konrad Zuse (Springer-Verlag, 1998).Nicolaas Rupke is Johnson Professor in the College at Washington and Lee University, having recently retired from the Chair of the History of Science at Göttingen. Among his books are Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin (Chicago, 2009) and Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Chicago, 2008). He is now working on the non-Darwinian tradition in evolutionary biology.Dr Juanita Feros Ruys is the Director of the University of Sydney Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and is currently investigating Scholastic approaches to demonology. Her study of the late poetic works of Peter Abelard will be published by Palgrave in 2014.Tilman Sauer teaches history of science at the University of Bern and is a Senior Editor with the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.John Scarborough is Professor in the School of Pharmacy and the Departments of History and Classics (quondam) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His books include Roman Medicine (1969; 1976) and Pharmacy and Drug Lore in Antiquity: Greece, Rome, Byzantium (2010). He is coeditor (with Paul T. Keyser) of the Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World (forthcoming).Andrew Scull is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His recent books include Madness: A Very Short Introduction, Hysteria: The Disturbing History, and Durkheim and the Law (2nd ed.), with Steven Lukes.J.B. Shank is a graduate of Stanford University with a Ph.D. in European History and Humanities. He is currently completing a book entitled Before Voltaire: Newton, “Newtonianism,” and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment which is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.Ruth Lewin Sime is Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Sacramento City College. She is the author of Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics and is now writing a biographical study of Otto Hahn.Daniel Lord Smail is a professor of history at Harvard University, where he works on deep human history and the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600. His current research approaches transformations in the material culture of later medieval Mediterranean Europe using household inventories and inventories of debt recovery from Lucca and Marseille.Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis is Professor of History of Science at the University of Florida. She is the author of Unifying Biology: The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology. Her interests include the history of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, genetics, and systematics, and she has published extensively in the history of the botanical sciences in North America.Rudolf Werner Soukup, of the Technische Universität Vienna, works on alchemy and early chemistry, chemical research in the Habsburg Monarchy, and Robert Bunsen's library in Althofen. He is the author of Alchemistisches Gold, Paracelsistische Pharmaka (1997), Die wissenschaftliche Welt von gestern (2004), Chemie in Österreich (2007), and Pioniere der Sexualhormonforschung (2010).David Spanagel is an assistant professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His first book (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming) is a study of the political, material, and cultural contexts of geological ideas in New York State during the early nineteenth century, centering on Amos Eaton.Max Stadler is Chair for Science Studies at ETH Zurich. Professor Stadler works on the history of perception, the nervous system, technology and design. He has published extensively on the history of neuroscience.Larry Stewart is Professor of History and Director of the “Situating Science” node at the University of Saskatchewan. He is the author of The Rise of Public Science (1992) and, with Margaret Jacob, Practical Matter (2004), as well as various essays on the dissemination of scientific knowledge since Newton. He is now writing a study of experiment during the Enlightenment and the first industrial revolution and is editing, with Erica Dyck, a collection of essays on the use of humans in experiments.Heiko Stoff is Guest Professor for the History of Science and Technology at the Technical University of Braunschweig. He is the author of Ewige Jugend: Konzepte der Verjüngung vom späten 19. Jahrhundert bis ins Dritte Reich (Böhlau, 2004) and Wirkstoffe: Eine Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Hormone, Vitamine und Enzyme, 1920–1970 (Stuttgart, 2012).Bruno J. Strasser is a professor at the University of Geneva and an adjunct professor at Yale University. He is the author of a book on the history of molecular biology in postwar Europe, La fabrique d'une nouvelle science: La biologie moléculaire à l'age aomique, 1945–1964 (Florence, 2006). He is now finishing a book on the history of biomedical collections and databases.Laurence Totelin is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include Hippocratic Recipes: Oral and Written Transmission of Pharmacological Recipes in Fifth- and Fourth-Century Greece (Brill, 2009).Janet Vertesi is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. Her recent research examines NASA's robotic space exploration missions; her book, Seeing Like a in on the is forthcoming from the University of Chicago in is a Fellow at the University of Her publications include the book University Press, and several research on the to the of Her current project with the history of is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, San Diego. His research is on the cultural history of early modern science, the and of His most recent book is The and is Professor of History and Philosophy at State College in New is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and a of early modern and the reception of She is the author of at the Origins of (Oxford, and The World Previous article by of the History of Science Society by The History of Science Society. articles this

De Koninck on the Philosophy of Nature J. M. Hubbard (bio) Charles De Koninck was born in Belgium in 1906. In 1934 he obtained a PhD from Louvain University with a dissertation on Sir Arthur Eddington. That same year he was hired by Laval University, Quebec, Canada, where he was dean of the faculty of philosophy from 1939–1956 and 1964–1965 and spent the rest of his life. In 1954 he obtained a doctorate in sacred theology from Laval with a dissertation on Mary’s Assumption, La Piété du Fils. He also taught at Notre Dame University in the fall semesters of 1957–1963. He died in Rome on February 13, 1965, while acting as conciliar theologian for Cardinal Roy of Quebec.1 De Koninck wrote on many topics: the common good, natural philosophy, the philosophy of science, Marxism, and Mariology. A [End Page 140] complete list of his 163 published works can be found in Melanges a la Memoire de Charles De Koninck.2 The bibliography also contains a list of the forty-seven dissertations he directed, most of which were excerpted in Laval Théologique et Philosophique. A. Gagne, the archivist who compiled the bibliography, notes that the unpublished work of De Koninck exceeds the published.3 The two articles by De Koninck presented here deal with topics in the philosophy of nature. It has become commonplace to consider the philosophy of nature as having been replaced by experimental science.4 After all, what is there to say about nature that science has not already said?5 Some have tried to save the philosophy of nature by reducing it to metaphysics; others have reduced it to the philosophy of science in its critical role of judging the results of science.6 Of those who attempted to find an autonomous role for the philosophy of nature, the preeminent was Jacques Maritain.7 He held that since the subject of the study of nature is ens mobile seu sensibile (changing or sensed things), there could be two more or less autonomous sciences of nature. One, the philosophy of nature, studied changing things precisely as things (res); the other, which he called empiriological science, studied changing things precisely as changing (mobile). In his first writing on the philosophy of nature, “Le Cosmos” (1936), De Koninck indicated agreement with Maritain.8 Five years later, however, in “Les sciences expérimentales sont-elles distinctes de la philosophie de la nature?” he presented a different view, one he was to refine the rest of his life.9 “The Unity and Diversity of Natural Science,” published in 1961 and here reprinted, is his last expression of this view. In this article, De Koninck argues, following Aristotle, that the philosophy of nature and experimental science are parts of one science of nature. There is but one science of nature, but there is diversity in the methods by means of which the human mind achieves knowledge of natural things and their behaviors.10 The unity arises from the consideration of natural science as the study of material things. [End Page 141] To understand this we must see that, following Aristotle, one must say that science studies general, universal things, not singulars (roses, not this rose bush; dogs, not Fido). It follows then, that sciences can be distinguished according to the ways they abstract from (leave aside) matter, which is, philosophically speaking, the source of individuality.11 There are thus three possibilities: a science that leaves aside individuating matter but not all sense matter, that is, natural science; one that leaves aside all sense matter but not all matter, that is, mathematics; and a science that studies things completely separated from matter, that is, metaphysics. From this point of view there can be but one science that studies natural things precisely with reference to their sensible matter: natural science. Philosophy of nature and the experimental sciences are fundamentally united in their study of material things. Of course, each may be further divided by the kinds of material things studied, but here we see the fundamental point of unity. So if there is one science of nature, how is one to understand the diversity...

The Cartesian concept of nature, which has determined modem thinking until the present time, has become obsolete. It shall be shown that Hegel's objective-idealistic conception of nature discloses, in comparison to that of Descartes, new perspectives for the comprehension of nature and that this, in turn, results in possibilities of actualizing Hegel's philosophy of nature.If the argumentation concerning philosophy of nature is intended to catch up with the concrete Being-of-nature and to meet it in its concretion, then this is impossible for the finite spirit in a strictly a priori sense — this is the thesis supported here which is not at all close to Hegel. As the argumentation rather has to consider the conditions of realization concerning the Being-of-nature, too, it is compelled to take up empirical elements — concerning the organism, for instance, system-theoretical aspects, physical and chemical features of the nervous system, etc. With that, on the one hand, empirical-scientific premises are assumed (e.g. the lawlikeness of nature), which on the other hand become (now close to Hegel) possibly able to be founded in the frame of a Hegelian-idealistic conception. In this sense, a double strategy of empirical-scientific concretization and objective-idealistic foundation is followed up, which represents the methodical basic principle of the developed considerations.In the course of the undertaking, the main aspects of the whole Hegelian design concerning the philosophy of nature are considered — space and time, mass and motion, force and law of nature, the organism, the problem of evolution, psychic being — as well as Hegel's basic thesis concerning the philosophy of nature, that therein a tendency towards coherence and idealization manifests itself in the sense of a (categorically) gradually rising succession of nature: from the separateness of space to the ideality of sensation. In the sense of the double strategy of concretization and foundation it is shown that on the one hand possibilities of philosophical penetration concerning actual empirical-scientific results are opened, and on the other hand — in tum — a re-interpretation of Hegel's theorem on the basis of physical, evolution-theoretical and system-theoretical argumentation also becomes possible. In this mutual crossing-over and elucidation of empirical and Hegelian argumentation not only do perspectives of a new comprehension of nature become visible, but also, at the same time — as an essential consequence of this methodical principle — thoughts on the possibilities of actualizing Hegel's philosophy of nature.

Nowadays, it seems that there are not enough studies on the philosophy and methods of physical sciences that would be attractive to the researchers in the field. However, many revolutionary inventions have come from the mechanism of the philosophical thought of the physical sciences. This is, of course, a vast and very interesting topic that must be investigated in detail by philosophers, scientists or philosopher-scientists such as physicists. In order to do justice to it one has to write a book. For example, you may think mainly of the historical aspect that is how methodology and philosophy of physical sciences developed in the last century and how it influenced the development in science. One may also think of the topic of methodology and philosophy in physics treated by a philosopher, a scientist or a physicist, which would mean from quite different points of view. Another important question of this topic that needs to be answered is the question of what can be done in methods and philosophy of physical sciences in the near future. The aim of the study: For a quarter of a century I have been interested in “ Philosophy of Sciences “ as a hobby and from time to time have given lectures on this subject to students of physics as an elective course, in which one of the main subjects of the course was “Philosophy and Methods of the Physical Sciences ,“ I would like to share my experience , knowledge and research results on these topics with distinguished science readers of public and to acquaint philosophical and methodological ideas that play an active role in the development process of physical sciences for those who want to do research to shed some light on this issue. In this direction, science of physics, relation between physics and philosophy-science, the philosophy and methods of classical physical sciences, philosophical comments of quantum theory, the methods and philosophy of modern physical sciences, Philosophy of Physics and the Methodology, how a scientist works to get a better understanding of the laws of nature, success through method, Einstein's methodology, impact of relativity, the conflicting views in the progress of modern physics, and the strategy adopted in the study of physical systems, have been examined.

Hegel's works on logic played an important role in the reception of his philosophy in Denmark, where theScience of Logicfound a handful of Danish imitators in the 1830s and 1840s. Beginning in 1831, Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860) gave lectures on Hegel's speculative logic and published, as a help to his students, hisOutline of the Philosophy of Philosophy or Speculative Logic, as a kind of handbook. Despite some significant deviations from the original, this work can be fairly characterised as a copy of Hegel'sScience of Logic, at times bordering on paraphrase. In response to criticisms of Hegel's account of the beginning of philosophy, Heiberg also presented some of this material again in the form of an article entitled ‘The System of Logic’. This piece, which he published in his Hegelian journalPerseus(Heiberg 1838: 1-45), treats the initial categories of Hegel's logic and tries to defend the notion of philosophy beginning with the categories of being and nothing. There are also extensive critical treatments of different aspects of Hegel's logic in Frederik Christian Sibbern's (1785-1872)Remarks and Investigations Primarily Concerning Hegel's Philosophy, with Regard to our Age, published in the same year. Another overt attempt to imitate Hegel's logic can be found in Adolph Peter Adler's (1812-69)Popular Lectures on Hegel's Objective Logic, which was published in 1842. This work, which also started as university lectures, treats in highly didactical fashion about the first two-thirds of Hegel'sScience of Logic.

Soft systems methodology is very important in systems research. It closely joints with and interacts with philosophy of science. The paper first analyses the philosophical basis of soft systems methodology (SSM) and the change of the philosophical paradigms underpinning the change from classical systems engineering to SSM. It then explores how SSM, as applied hermeneutics and constructivism, partially influences the development of philosophy of natural science and philosophy of social science. It finally arrives at the conclusion that the relationship between hard systems methodology (HSM) and SSM is inter‐exclusive and inter‐complementary in different aspects at the same abstract level rather than the relationship between the universal and the particular at different language levels. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.