Abstract
In a popular textbook on physics, written with an historical and philosophical bias, when turning to the chapters devoted to the subject of ‘colour’, we all of a sudden light upon a section entitled ‘The Estrangement between Science and Philosophy’.1 Prior to this, the reader has been taken through the properties of the refraction and reflection and propagation of light, lenses, mirrors, rays of light, angles of incidence, image formation, and so on. Here the text interrupts, and the author turns to Hegel, quoting from the Zusatz to § 275 of the Philosophy of Nature the ‘definition of light’:Light is the enclosed totality of matter, only as pure force, the intensive life sustaining itself within itself, the celestial sphere which has withdrawn within itself, whose vortex is just this immediate opposition of directions of the self-relating motion, in whose flux and reflux all distinction is extinguished. As existent identity, it is a pure line which refers only to itself. Light is this pure existent force of space-filling, its being is absolute velocity, present pure materiality, real existence which is in itself, or actuality as a transparent possibility (PN, § 275, Z, p. 87).2
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Lloyd William Taylor, Physics. The Pioneer Science (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1941), p. 490. (New York, Dover, 1959, 2 vols.)
Cf. Gerd Buchdahl, ‘History of Science and Criteria of Choice’, in Historical and Philosophical Perspectives of Science. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 5 (ed. R. Stuewer, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 1970), pp. 204–30. I have used a similar criterial scheme for a more general characterisation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature in ‘Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature and the Structure of Science’, Ratio 15 (1973), 1–27.
Cf. Gerd Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science. The Classical Sources: Descartes to Kant (Oxford, Blackwell; Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1969), ch.8, sect. 4c(iv), pp. 512–16.
Cf. Kant’s Prolegomena and Metaphysical Foundations of Science (tr. E. B. Bax, London, Bell, 1883), ch. II: ‘General Observation on Dynamics’, p. 200; Schriften (Ak. ed., Berlin, 1911), vol. 4, p. 524, line 24. Also Buchdahl, Metaphysic…., pp. 567–8.
For Ptolemy, see M. R. Cohen and I. E. Drabkin, A Source Book in Greek Science ( New York, McGraw Hill, 1948 ), pp. 268–71.
Cf. Buchdahl, Metaphysics… ch.3, sect. 2c-d, for Descartes’s Optics, and ch.7, sect. 3b, pp. 425–34, for Leibniz’s use of his theory of refraction.
Cf. Johannes Kepler. Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2 (ed. W. v. Dyck and Max Caspar, Munich, Beck, 1938 –), ch.2, pp. 85–86. See my ‘Methodological Aspects of Kepler’s Theory of Refraction’, Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 3 (1972), 265–298, especiallypp. 283–86.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1984 D. Reidel Publishing Company
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Buchdahl, G. (1984). Conceptual Analysis and Scientific Theory in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (With Special Reference to Hegel’s Optics). In: Cohen, R.S., Wartofsky, M.W. (eds) Hegel and the Sciences. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 64. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6233-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6233-0_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-009-6235-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-6233-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive