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Hegel's Philosophy of Biology? A Programmatic Overview

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2020

Andrea Gambarotto  and
Luca Illetterati
Andrea Gambarotto
Affiliation:
Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, UC Louvain, Belgium [email protected]
Luca Illetterati
Affiliation:
Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, UC Louvain, Belgium [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper presents what we call ‘Hegel's philosophy of biology’ to a target audience of both Hegel scholars and philosophers of biology. It also serves to introduce a special issue of the Hegel Bulletin entirely dedicated to a first mapping of this yet to be explored domain of Hegel studies. We submit that Hegel's philosophy of biology can be understood as a radicalization of the Kantian approach to organisms, and as prefiguring current philosophy of biology in important ways, especially with regard to the nature of biological organization, the role of teleology in biological explanation, and the relation between life and cognition.

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Hegel Bulletin , Volume 41 , Special Issue 3: Hegel and the Philosophy of Biology , December 2020 , pp. 349 - 370
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Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2020

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