Chemistry in Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik

Hegel’s chef-d’œuvre, the Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic), contains a section on ‘measure’. As ‘measure’ unites the two categories ‘quality’ and ‘quantity’, it is a key aspect for determining qualitative and quantitative objects, and hence is the decisive category for natural sciences. In the chemical passages of this section, Hegel took concepts from chemistry (for example ‘elective attraction’), changed their function, and converted them into categories of logic. In this paper, the relationship between the development of categories by reflecting reason and the chemical material cited for this development is discussed. Hegel claimed that the chemical material presupposed in the logical development could be replaced with specified proportions of measures, derived from developing and specifying the category ‘measure’. This claim is criticized