Apriorism and Scientific Cooperation in Hegel

Abstract Hegel’s commentators often attribute to his system some form of apriorism, the view that the system’s content or its justification (or both) are independent of experience and empirical science. In this article, I argue that apriorism conflicts with Hegel’s commitment to cooperation between philosophy and empirical science, as outlined in §§1–18 of the 1830 Encyclopaedia . I do so by attributing two theses to Hegel: scientific cooperation —that knowledge arises through a process of conceptual transformation, involving an intellectual division of labour between philosophy and empirical science; and incompatibility —that scientific cooperation entails a feedback loop between philosophy and empirical science, rendering the concepts of Hegel’s system intrinsically empirically revisable, and so not a priori. Although these two theses hold across all the philosophical sciences, I focus on their application in logic, as it is in logic where apriorist interpretations appear the most justified. Reimagining a scientifically cooperative Hegel not only supports naturalist readings of his system but also reframes the task of philosophical critique. Critique, on the scientific-cooperative reading I propose, aims to exposit the insights, discoveries and theories of the empirical sciences, furthering their ends by ameliorating their conceptual apparatus, not to debunk them.