For most of its history western philosophy was dominated by metaphysics, the attempt to know the necessary features of the world simply by thinking. Then came Kant, who showed that reason alone can’t gain knowledge of the world without the help of experience. Hegel’s philosophy is seen by many as ignoring the lessons of Kant’s critique of metaphysics and regressing to a pre-Kantian style of philosophy. But a more careful reading of Hegel shows that he was not in fact ignoring Kant’s lesson, but following his argument: Even if pure reason can’t know the world, it can know itself. And in discovering the nature of thought, Hegel argued, one also discovers the nature of anything that can be thought, that is, reality. Thus, writes Robert Pippin, Hegel was able to change the fate of metaphysics.
Philosophy is not an empirical enterprise. Its traditional claim is to be a form of knowledge about reality, even though it does not rely on observation about that reality. If there is philosophical knowledge, it is a priori knowledge, and if it is knowledge, it claims something true about reality not accessible to empirical observation or confirmation. Philosophy’s claims to a priori knowledge seems to lead us inevitably to what has always been, until the last two-hundred and fifty years or so, the center of philosophy, its inescapable “big” question: metaphysics.
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