Tag «History»

Catholicism and Science

Catholicism and Science: Renaissance Painting with Galileo

‘Effectively, Catholicism lost its moral authority the minute it mixed epistemic and pisteic belief — breaking the link between holy and the profane.’ —writes Nassim Nicholas Taleb, on Medium in his article On Christianity. I think that there is enough space here for some nuances. Modern science did not appear from anywhere but was itself …

Idealism vs Realism in Modernity

Idealism vs realism: Statue of Immanuel Kant

We think of Hegel not only as one of the most important philosophers but also as one of the most important representatives of the philosophy of identity. I understand here by ‘philosophy of identity’ that type of philosophy that states the fundamental identity or correspondence between the human mind and external reality. Because of its …

On Hegel’s A Priori Approach

Hegel's A Priori Approach: Geometrical Figure

We must acknowledge that the distinction between a priori and a posteriori raises many difficulties for an understanding of Hegel’s philosophy of nature. Some interpreters have contended that the a priori character of this philosophy makes it completely senseless in that it claims the legitimacy to replace empirical research of science with the pure logical …

Philosophy as Science of First Principles

Philosophy as science of first Principles: Library

There is an interesting misunderstanding concerning Hegel: the idea that he wanted to explain everything through his philosophical system, that he tried to raise himself to the absolute knowledge of God. Of course, this is also based on his own words, concepts, or expressions like ‘absolute knowledge’ that accompany his explanations concerning his philosophy. But …

Time, Space and Archeology

Acropoles

Time and space, seen as contents of thought, are for Hegel, only possibilities. Both represent self-externalities, that is to say, magnitudes containing within themselves a multitude, a diversity of contents that cannot overlap. This is when we see time and space separately. Now, if we combine these two structures, the self-externality of space with the …

Unhappy Consciousness 

Unhappy Consciousness: unhappy women

In Hegel, unhappy consciousness is, of course, the result of the skeptical consciousness, of that consciousness that nowhere sees any truth. This consciousness has only itself, in its pure singularity, and nothing else, without any bonds to the world or others. The lack of bonds with the world consists of the claimed incognoscibility of the …

The Absolute and the History

The Absolute and the History: Statue of Jesus

The question of whether space is subjective or objective is meaningless in Hegel. We are spatial beings, this is the way we experience ourselves, and experience is the ‘final frontier’ in Hegel: you cannot go beyond it to see how this experience is made up. Such an approach is very similar to what Kant calls …

Through History Toward Meaning

It is important to note in the context of discussing some differences between Hegel’s and Kant’s approach to space that, unlike Kant, Hegel is not much interested in discussing the quality of space, i.e., its relatedness to our intuition or the way we perceive spatiality, but rather in its meaning. As in his general approach, …