2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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T HE END OF PHILOSOPHY
dition. However, Wissenschaft is not, by and large, qualitatively different from the current
English word “science,” the main difference being one of scope, at least if one allows that
different disciplines may have different methods to ascertain the objective validity of their
truths. Far from being tainted by an old-fashioned conception of science, Wissenschaft is
instead more general in scope and more epistemologically neutral than the current use of
the term “science,” because it does not assume a built-in preference for the mathematical-
physical paradigm as the standard of validity. When Hegel asserts that philosophy has to
become a “science,” then, he is stating that the truths provided by philosophy must be as
epistemologically valid as those provided by, say, physics or philology, but he is not assum-
ing that there must me one preferred epistemological standard provided by a specific dis-
cipline. To put it differently, there are no substantive claims hidden behind the use of the
term Wissenschaft (which was in fact quite common at the time), but rather the effort to use
a term broad enough to cover disciplines across the board with no special epistemological
preferences. The use of the term Wissenschaft makes in fact Hegel closer to philosophers
like Carnap and Russell than to what we ordinarily design with the umbrella term “Conti-
nental” philosophy. The difference lies in the kind of truths (and therefore the kind of meth-
ods) that philosophy can reach. There is little doubt that the Russellian analysis of
propositions is far different from Hegel’s dialectical progression of concepts in the Wissen-
schaft der Logik, but the epistemological goal that philosophy must attain is the same. 17
It might be contended, however, that it is precisely this overvaluation of theory that
makes Hegel’s argument for the end of philosophy suspicious. It might be said, in other
words, that philosophy is, and perhaps has always been, engaged in the search for “Sophia”,
the latter term to be reinterpreted as a form of practical wisdom and not as a science-like
form of knowledge. The issue becomes whether such a (very broadly construed) “ethical”
wisdom can stand on its own without a metaphysics to support it. As a matter of fact, in our
17. More precisely, it may be said that it was as a reaction against the “metaphysics way of attaining truth”
that the logical analysis was devised (see, for example, Carnap’s violent critique of Heidegger’s inaugural
lecture on “What is metaphysics?” as a mere word-play that is meaningless because it just confounds
the various meanings of “nicht.”). In other words: the path had to change so that the destination
could be reached.