Comment on J. N. Findlay "Hegel and the Philosophy of Physics"
pp. 90-97
in: Joseph J. O'Malley, K Algozin, Howard P. Kainz, RICE (eds), The legacy of Hegel, Berlin, Springer, 1973Abstract
One of the problems a reader has in pursuing Hegel is that of knowing when he has arrived at the truth of the matter, for any grasp of the real by the mind is necessarily incomplete and one sided and easily falsely taken for the complete and correct account. To the Greeks of Aristotle's era the hot the cold the dry and the moist combined in various ways to produce the four elements — air, earth, water and fire. If such an account of physical nature were in any sense true, it should still be found in some form in the present day works written by chemists and physicists. It is to be found only in poems or in prose which makes no pretense of accounting for the physical world in statements testable by anyone. I do not see any grounds upon which Hegel's adoption of this thesis about the four elements is defensible as being science or philosophy.
