Hegel as speculative philosopher

Hegel holds that philosophy is a wholly unique discipline, which deals with unique objects and employs a unique method (EL §§ 1–4). Philosophy is distinguished both from everyday common sense and from the empirical sciences by the way it abstracts from their concerns, and grasps in their purity the “determinations of thought” which, unnoticed, provide everyday life and inquiry with their genuine content (EL § 5; WL 5: 38/45). In Hegel's view, the foundation of all philosophy is the self-evolving system of these abstract thought-determinations, presented in the purely philosophical discipline of speculative logic.

Hegel sees traditional Aristotelian logic as an empty, formal discipline; he intends speculative logic to transform it into a science with profound metaphysical content (EL § 24). Speculative logic will thereby provide a metaphysical key to the a priori comprehension of all reality, enabling philosophy to encompass and systematize the results of empirical science and give to them an a priori character (EL § 12). In so doing, it will overcome the alien, accidental, and objective form taken by these facts in the modern empirical sciences (EL § 7), exhibiting the inner essence of the objective world as at one with our own freedom as thinkers (EL § 23). Hegel thus regards his own philosophical achievement as fundamentally a contribution to metaphysics or “first philosophy.”