In this article, I discuss the specific ways in which Hegel's account of life and organisms advances upon Kant's account of natural purposes in the third Critique. First of all, I argue that it is essential for Hegel's account that it contains two levels. The first level is that of logical life, the discussion of which does not depend on any empirical knowledge of natural organisms. I provide my reconstruction of this logical account of life that answers to the objection made by a number of Hegel scholars to the effect that Hegel does in fact rely on empirical knowledge at this place in the logic.The second level is that of natural organisms themselves. I argue that it is with the help of this separation of the logical and natural levels, as well as his doctrine of the impotence of nature, that Hegel, unlike Kant, (a) is able to claim that not everything in natural organisms is purposive, and (b) provide a philosophical, and not merely empirical, account of the distinction between plants and animals. In both of these respects, Hegel's position can be seen as a welcome advance over Kant.

Hegel often criticizes the use of unobservable entities postulated in scientific theories. For example, he claims that atoms are not things but, rather, thoughts, and that various imponderable stuffs such as caloric are not independently existing things but, rather, "moments" of material bodies. In this paper I argue that, in such passages, Hegel expresses his original metaphysics of nature, which I relate to the different positions on the relation between what Sellars has called the "scientific image" and the "manifest image." I reconstruct those aspects of Hegel's philosophy of inorganic nature that allow us to understand Hegel's position in detail, as well as his reasoning in support of it. I argue that, for Hegel, mechanical properties of bodies are abstractions from the bodies that have a full complement of physical and chemical properties standing in specific relations of dependency. Such bodies correspond to the objects of our manifest image, which thus has priority over the scientific image for Hegel. | INTRODUCTIONHegel's philosophy of nature is one of the least popular and studied parts of Hegel's legacy. Recently, some scholarly attention has turned towards it and the topics related to it, especially to Hegel's account of life, the relationship between his philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit, and the bearing of the Hegelian approach to nature on issues in environmental philosophy. For some decades now, there has also been a steady stream of publications, primarily in German, on specific parts of the philosophy of nature, for example on Hegel's treatment of mechanics and

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