Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (first published as such in 1842, and based on §§245–376 from the 1830 Encyclopaedia, supplemented by material and student transcripts from Hegel’s Berlin lectures) has often been damned by the contention that Hegel had simply dismissed the activity of the natural sciences, especially Newtonian science, as based upon the inadequacies of the Understanding, and in their place had tried to somehow deduce the natural world from philosophical first principles. Recently, however, defenses of Hegel’s philosophy of science have started to emerge, especially from the side of Hegel’s reformed metaphysical interpreters. Thus, it has been argued by Westphal (2008) for example, that Hegel’s philosophy of nature actually represents a sophisticated attempt to think through epistemological assumptions that are presupposed by the development of Newton’s theory. Defending Hegel’s philosophy of science from a similar point of view, James Kreines (2008) has argued for the relevance of Hegel’s logical categories for the biological sciences of his times. We won’t here attempt to present such arguments, but before any such reassessment of Hegel’s work here could be undertaken, the fundamental criticism raised above of a project that attempts to base a philosophy of nature on his logic rather than the empirical sciences must be addressed. Was not Hegel simply trying to pre-empt the work of empirical scientists by somehow attempting to anticipate the very contents of their discoveries from logical considerations alone?