On Russell you are without a doubt mistaken. Every person I have spoken too or work I have read referring to it is quite explicit that, while the book is a good read and introduction, it has significant failings as an actual work on the history of philosophy, particularly the history of modern philosophy. Russell, being an analytic philosopher at the height of the divide between the two schools, lacked the required conceptual background to actually properly understand some of it. He is generally taken to misunderstand Kant, at least to an extent, apparently dismisses Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi, a common but grossly erroneous view if true, and omits key figures such as Kierkegaard. That said I must actually read it at some point...
I'm sorry, but we've reached the point where I say what I read from critics and you say what you read/talked with other people. You say I'm "without a doubt mistaken" but you have not offered any substance to prove it.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just saying that stating "you are mistaken" is not enough. If you don't provide any reason why Russell's criticism of Hegel is invalid, I'll keep regarding it as valid. Also, I don't see how he having failed to mention Kierkegaard in any way makes his criticism of Hegel less valid...
Hegel may have invented some aspect of physics out of thin air, I am not in a position to comment.
May have invented? Not in a position to judge?
If his garbage on sound, gravity and etc. that I provided earlier are not enough, how about his definition of heat, also from his
Philosophy of Nature (that book is one huge gold mine):
"Heat is the self-restoration of matter in formlessness, its liquidity the triumph of its abstract homogeneity over specific definiteness, its abstract, purely self-existing continuity, as negation of negation, is here set as activity"
Do you think you need to be a trained physicist to recognize the above not only as plainly false, but also as incomprehensible gibberish? Do you need vast philosophical training to see he was plainly making stuff up, in a way that can only be described as intellectually dishonest?
You tell me: has any human being who ever lived been capable of understanding Hegel's definition of heat?
This is not "erroneous physics", this is made up gibberish. The difference is huge, and crucial. One is honest, and indeed every thinker and scientist in history was wrong about something. But making up gibberish, and presenting it as an universal truth, is the opposite of good philosophy.
But, as far as I know, Hegel is not famous for either his correct refutation of Bode's law or pseudo-science, depending on which one of you is correct,
I'd really like to know how Hegel correctly refuted Bode's Law by fiddling with numbers from Timaeus and reaching a sequence that described the solar system in a less precise way than Titus-Bode.
That whole article (De Orbitis Planetarium) is full of grotesque mistakes (eg. on eliptical orbits, proving he was not exactly good in math) and plain gibberish (eg., on gravity and centrifugal force).
but rather his work on freedom, society, historicism, progress, idealism and a host of other topics.
He did write a whole book about philosophy of nature, and his very first dissertation dealt with planetary orbits. Just because those works are now seen as an embarrassment to his followers does not mean we shouldn't expose him for all the gibberish he wrote.
At any rate, his historicism, dialectics, view on "national spirit" and etc. don't seem particularly original to me, and all I've read on Hegel's views on freedom corroborates Russell and Popper's interpretation that he didn't mean freedom in any meaningful way.
To dismiss all of this work as the nonsensical gibberish of a charlatan, rather than serious but extremely obscure philosophy that may or may not collapse into gibberish under a sustained philosophical attack, based on some erroneous physics, that is not the core issue anyway and can be completely wrong or made up without inflicting damage on the rest of the system, is rash and foolish at best. If you do not like Hegel or find him difficult or impossible to understand move on but you are not in a position to actually dismiss a theory you have no comprehension of.
I am not in a position to comprehend the latest breakthroughs in physics unless some kind scientist renders the science down in nice wordy metaphors but even then I do not truly understand it as I cannot understand the maths. For all I know modern quantum theory could be a giant charade but I do not dismiss it because I personally cannot understand it.
To put it another way if Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit can be dismissed as nonsense without a sustained philosophical attack to prove it then Principia Mathematica was nonsense when it was published! I mean a large part of the notation was made up for crying out loud!
Only a handful of people could understand it when it was published and even now it is a highly specific book only mathematicians, logicians and philosophers of mathematics actually use. Yet oddly enough both are regarded as highly technical and difficult works, with advocates and detractors within their respective traditions and, exclusively in the case of Hegel, outside, that have greatly influenced the course of their respective schools and thus the general course of philosophy in the 20th century.
And now we reach the core of your argument, namely, that I shouldn't criticize Hegel because I am not one of the initiated in the higher studies of philosophy. Hegel's philosophy is only meant for a selected few, who can rejoice on the belief of understanding something that is totally incomprehensible for a normal human being. Doubtless this sort of attitude is a big part of the explanation for Hegel's popularity and influence among some circles.
But this line of argument defeats itself considering that Hegel has been the subject of devastating critiques by some of the most influential philosophers in history, such as Schopenhauer, Russell, Popper, Arendt, Ortega y Gasset, and several others, who dismissed his work on much harsher terms than I used. Were they not "well-versed in the rich veins of philosophical history"?
I think the comparison of gibberish with modern physics to be bizarre. For starters, anyone writing a physics paper
has to write in the clearest way possible. That's considered a pre-requisite of any honest research. Second, if a physicist is caught making the same sort of stuff up as Hegel he will be ostracized and never taken seriously again.
Technical research on modern physics may be incomprehensible to the layman, but it is composed at the end of the day of coherent concepts that can and indeed are translated to the general public all the time. When people attempt to "translate" Hegel to the general public we end up with bitter discussions even among his committed followers, who can't agree even on the meaning of his prefaces. In fact it is much more like the discussions within a religious sect then between researchers.
Not wanting to get involved in any of this or anything, but I just couldn't help but smile when luiz first said that philosophers should write understandable things and then positively mentioned Russell. The wikipedia "introduction of notation" on his Principia Mathematica is a couple of pages long and the Plato version is even worse
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pm-notation/.
Well if you read your own link you'll note the difficulty with Principia lies basically on it using notations that have been largely replaced, but that the system it employs is very precise, sound, and created to be easily understandable (and can indeed be understood by anyone with some training).
This thread reads like someone read one book on someone else, and then with great emotional gusto, proclaims that one author's viewpoint to be the truth and argues it with the doors to counter-criticism locked shut.
To me it seems that only one side actually provided quotations (with identified origins) and bothered to try to analyze Hegel's arguments (on freedom, for instance). The other side has merely repeated that as a mere mortal not initiated in the deeper secrets of Hegelianism we should just shut up and refrain from judging his philosophy even in the face of clear gibberish. I saw lot of appeals to authority and accusations of ignorance and zero substance from the side defending Hegel.
Apparently those "well-versed in the rich veins of philosophical history" can make sense out of the passages provided in this thread.
