Systematic Balance: What Hegel Can Contribute to Philosophy of Science
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
What Philosophy of Science Confirms
Post-positivist philosophy of science confirms central insights:
Knowledge does not develop linearly. Kuhn’s “revolutions” are ruptures that simultaneously preserve continuity – the phenomena must be saved.
Truth, for us, is a process. Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend – all emphasize that science is never “finished.” We cannot stand outside the process and behold the “final truth.”
Criticism is productive. Negation (refutation, anomaly, crisis) is not the end but the drive of knowledge.
What Hegel Can Contribute
The resolution of the incommensurability thesis: paradigm shifts are expansions of the disjunction, not incommensurable ruptures. “The phenomena must be saved” – this is a rational criterion that binds even revolutionary upheavals.
The distinction between timeless structures and time-bound applications: some scientific statements capture enduring structures, while others are bound to their historical context. Confusing the two leads to misplaced criticism.
Method develops together with its object: method is neither fixed a priori (against Popper) nor arbitrary (against a misunderstood Feyerabend). It shows itself, in the process of truth, to be adequate or inadequate to its object.
The Open Question: Is There Progress?
Kuhn and Feyerabend raised the question: is there really progress – or only change?
The answer: there is progress, but it is not a linear path toward a finished goal. Progress lies in increasing self-transparency – in coming to grasp what we are doing when we do science. Science becomes not only richer in content but also more methodologically self-aware. That is progress – not as approximation to a finished truth, but as a deepening of the process of truth itself.
Outlook: The “Science Wars” of the 1990s
In the 1990s the “Science Wars” broke out – a dispute between natural scientists and sociologists over the status of scientific knowledge. The “Sokal affair” (1996) became its symbol. This debate – and its possible resolution – will be treated in Volume III.
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Spiral Staircase Notes:
- On Popper as critic of Hegel: cf. Chap. 2.2 (critique of totalitarianism)
- On Koyré as background to Kuhn: cf. Chap. 6.5 (French philosophy)
- On GDR philosophy of nature: cf. Chap. 10.6
- On the “Science Wars”: cf. Volume III
- On the question of incommensurability: cf. Chap. 18 (Postmodernism) – Lyotard’s differend