2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

P HILOSOPHY’ S ENDS
Therefore, our own, more limited telos becomes to come closer to that place where
ends meet and try to see what happens “there.” The Hegelian text is helpful, in this respect,
since, after the first formulation of the paradoxical relation between philosophy and history,
the text its analysis proceeds to an examination of the different relationships that a disci-
pline may entertain with its history, and therefore with its end. In other words, Hegel pro-
vides an analysis of the different encounters that philosophy has always had with its own
end, conducted by comparison with the models offered by other, related disciplines, where
different types of truth and different types of end come to meet.
4. Philosophy’s ends
In which ways can a discipline relate to its history and, therefore, to its possible end?
In the Lectures, Hegel compares philosophy to the other sciences and to religion and claims
that their model cannot be adopted by philosophy although they both share important sim-
ilarities with it. Hegel conducts his discussion on the possibility of philosophy by assuming
that philosophy is (or has to become) a science. This assumption looks so outdated that it
seems to cast a very dark shadow on the relevance of the Hegelian argument for contem-
porary philosophy. However, a brief discussion will show that, once terminology has been
clarified, the disagreement is more apparent than real.
In its current most common uses, “science” generally denotes the body of knowledge
provided by the natural and physical sciences. In other words, it denotes the “connected
body of either demonstrated truth or systematically classified facts brought under general
laws that can be found in the study of the material universe,” as the dictionary has it. The
German word used by Hegel, Wissenschaft, has a broader denotation and refers, to use He-
gel’s own words, to any discipline capable of providing an “objective, discursive knowl-
edge.” The Hegelian accent is on a discipline capable of exhibiting objective truths that can
be expressed discursively, i.e. in concepts and not, for example, in some intuitive feeling.
“Philology,” then, is as much a science as physics, insofar as its methods can establish a
(perhaps limited, but nonetheless valid) set of truths about a text handed down by the tra-
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