Kommentar zur Naturphilosophie, Chapter 13
The List of Errors — and Why It’s Shorter Than Its Reputation
M. J. Petry, who translated Hegel’s philosophy of nature and checked it point by point against the science of the day, arrives at a balance sheet more sober than one might expect: the actual errors are few and widely scattered — “few and far between.” Given this work’s reputation, it is worth recording them clearly.[1]
What he records: projectile motion never reduces to simple fall (§ 266 Add.). The moon’s mean distance is not sixty times the Earth’s diameter (§ 270 Add.). Hegel denies the axial rotation of the moons, though good evidence for it existed (§ 279 Rem.). And he grossly underestimates the speed of sound in the ground (§ 300 Add.).
Two observations about this matter more than the list itself.
First, the textual criticism. On the first error, Petry notes that the passage comes from Michelet’s addition and is taken from the Jena notebook of 1805/06. It thus does not appear in Hegel’s printed text and reflects a state of knowledge twenty years older. This holds for a portion of the notorious passages: the Additions are editorial work assembled from heterogeneous material.
Second, the source of the second error. Petry suspects that Hegel was misled by Newton’s own formulation (Principia, Book III). The error thus stems from the very physics against which he was polemicizing.
And Petry explicitly sets this finding of errors against Benedetto Croce’s 1906 judgment that Hegel had rejected the natural sciences while at the same time clinging to their coattails. He calls Croce’s criticism ignorant and poorly grounded — a judgment a translator may make who has checked every single passage. [KF]
M. J. Petry, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, vol. 1, editor’s introduction. ↩︎