Petrified Intelligence offers the first comprehensive treatment of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, exploring its central place within his system, including its relation to his Logic, Philosophy of Mind, and moral and political thought. It highlights the contemporary relevance of Hegel's approach to nature, particularly with respect to environmental issues. Challenging the standard view that Hegel devalues nature relative to mind and culture, Alison Stone reveals the deep concern to re-enchant the natural world that pervades his entire philosophical project. Written in clear and nontechnical language, the book also provides a critical introduction to Hegel's metaphysics.

Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature is an important new study of Hegel's profound philosophical account of the natural world. It examines Hegel's alleged idealism, his concepts of space and time, the conception of speculative geometry, his critical engagement with Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, his critique of Newtonian science, his concept of evolution, the notion of Aufhebung, and his infamous theory of planetary objects. The book confirms that, far from being surpassed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific developments, Hegel's philosophy of nature continues to have great significance for our understanding of the natural world. [Contributors include Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Olivier Depré, Mauro Nasti De Vincentis, Brigitte Falkenburg, Cinzia Ferrini, Edward Halper, Errol E. Harris, William Maker, Lawrence S. Stepelevich, Donald Phillip Verene, Kenneth R. Westphal, and Richard Dien Winfield.]

The second part of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in outline. Translated, and with an introduction by, MJ Petry.

Hegel's aim in this work is to interpret the varied phenomena of Nature from the standpoint of a dialectical logic. Those who still think of Hegel as a merely a priori philosopher will here find abundant evidence that he was keenly interested in and very well informed about empirical science.

To the scientists and philosophers of our time, Hegel has been either a ne glected or a provocative thinker, a source of irrelevant dark metaphysics or of complex but insightful analysis. His influence upon the work of natural scientists has seemed minimal, in the main; and his stimulus to the nascent sciences of society and to psychology has seemed to be as often an obstacle as an encouragement. Nevertheless his philosophical analysis of knowledge and the knowing process, of concepts and their evolutionary formation, of rationality in its forms and histories, of the stages of empirical awareness and human practice, all set within his endless inquiries into cultural formations from the entire sweep of human experience, must, we believe, be confronted by anyone who wants to understand the scientific consciousness. Indeed, we may wish to situate the changing theories of nature, and of humankind in nature, within a philosophical account of men and women as social practi tioners and as sensing, thinking, feeling centers of privacy; and then we will see the work of Hegel as a major effort to mediate between the purest of epistemological investigations and the most practical of the political and the religious. This book, long delayed to our deep regret, derives from a Symposium on Hegel and the Sciences which was sponsored jointly by the Hegel Society of America and the Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science a decade ago.

Terry Pinkard draws on Hegel's central works as well as his lectures on aesthetics, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history in this deeply informed and original exploration of Hegel's naturalism. As Pinkard explains, Hegel's version of naturalism was in fact drawn from Aristotelian naturalism: Hegel fused Aristotle's conception of nature with his insistence that the origin and development of philosophy has empirical physics as its presupposition. As a result, Hegel found that, although modern nature must be understood as a whole to be non-purposive, there is nonetheless a place for Aristotelian purposiveness within such nature. Such a naturalism provides the framework for explaining how we are both natural organisms and also practically minded (self-determining, rationally responsive, reason-giving) beings. In arguing for this point, Hegel shows that the kind of self-division which is characteristic of human agency also provides human agents with an updated version of an Aristotelian final end of life. Pinkard treats this conception of the final end of "being at one with oneself" in two parts. The first part focuses on Hegel's account of agency in naturalist terms and how it is that agency requires such a self-division, while the second part explores how Hegel thinks a historical narration is essential for understanding what this kind of self-division has come to require of itself. In making his case, Hegel argues that both the antinomies of philosophical thought and the essential fragmentation of modern life are all not to be understood as overcome in a higher order unity in the "State." On the contrary, Hegel demonstrates that modern institutions do not resolve such tensions any more than a comprehensive philosophical account can resolve them theoretically. The job of modern practices and institutions (and at a reflective level the task of modern philosophy) is to help us understand and live with precisely the unresolvability of these oppositions. Therefore, Pinkard explains, Hegel is not the totality theorist he has been taken to be, nor is he an "identity thinker," à la Adorno. He is an anti-totality thinker.