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Toward the end of the preface to his Philosophie des Rechts, Hegel observes that "the owl of Minerva takes flight only with the gathering of dusk".¹ He says this in connection with his view that philosphy always comesn on the scene after the processes with which it is concerned are completed. Taking Minerva's owl as a symbol of knowledge, this amounts to saying that the explanations which the philosopher makes are nonpredictive. From Hegel's viewpoint, the insights furnished by philosophy are designed rather to reconcile us to the way the world is now than to show us how to predict or to ameliorate its future development.² And yet, while the philosopher can not aspire to certainty about the future, he does presumably obtain necessary or infallible knowledge of the past.³ Moreover, this necessary knowledge of the past is to be gathered in a "scientific and objective" manner.⁴ To sum up, Hegel appears to be saying that philosophy gives us ex post facto a scientific, logically coherent, infallible, nonpredictive explanation of important occurrences in the world — an explanation serving to reconcile us to aspects of those occurences which, considered in isolation, would make us so bitter that we should be unable to cope adequately with the future.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-3371-8_4

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