Hegel's Essentialism. Natural Kinds and the Metaphysics of Explanation in Hegel's Theory of ‘the Concept’

Knappik, Franz

doi:10.1111/ejop.12129

Cited by 17 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…I found Knappik 2016 valuable in providing this historical context, though my reading of Hegel is essentially the opposite of his: Knappik thinks that Hegel agrees ‘with Linné and his followers in the scientific debate, that genera are objectively existing universals which provide an objective ordering of reality’ (Knappik 2016: 763). Knappik, I think, reaches this conclusion too hastily from seeing that Hegel is not a nominalist; he misses the subtle alternative Hegel, on my reading, articulates.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Origins and Species: Hegel on the Genus-Process

Lindquist¹

2020

Hegel Bulletin

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There is a broad consensus in the literature that in the section on ‘The Genus’ in the Science of Logic, Hegel argues that any living being must exist among other instances of its kind, with which it reproduces to create future generations, and out of which it was itself produced. This view is not only hard to motivate philosophically, it also seems to contradict many things Hegel says elsewhere in his system about the details of living nature, especially concerning the reality of spontaneous generation. After an examination of the secondary literature on ‘The Genus’, I offer an alternative view of this section, which I call ‘the Modal Reading’. The Modal Reading sees the language of pluralities in ‘The Genus’ as really Hegel's peculiar way of articulating certain modal features of thoughts about the living: to grasp a living individual as living, we need to distinguish not only between this individual and its environment, but also between the things this individual actually does and other possibilities which it does not actualize. The Modal Reading has a logical motivation insofar as it articulates what is needed to think of a living being as living, but it also avoids saddling Hegel with the problematic entailments he is usually read as taking on in this section. A further upshot of the Modal Reading is that approaching Hegel in this way provides us with a way to see Hegel as defending a non-nominalistic alternative to essentialist accounts of living kinds. Finding a way to read ‘The Genus’ which coheres with Hegel's views elsewhere in his system thus shows Hegel to have been an especially subtle and penetrating thinker, with continuing relevance for the philosophy of biology.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Origins and Species: Hegel on the Genus-Process

Lindquist¹

2020

Hegel Bulletin

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“…19 See Siep, Halbig, and Quante (2001), Westphal (2003), Corti (2016Corti ( , 2018. 20 See, among others, Stern (1990), Halbig (2002Halbig ( , 2009, Kreines (2015), Knappik (2016). 21 McDowell would speak of "thinkables"-cf.…”

Section: Dreams and Epistemic Errorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hegel, grandfather of disjunctivism

Sanguinetti

2020

The Philosophical Forum

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In this paper, I shall investigate whether Hegel can be considered as a sort of ancestor of McDowell’s disjunctivism. If this hypothesis turns out to be plausible, then the paper offers two gains. On the one hand, it offers an innovative interpretation of the way in which Hegel conceives of our sensible epistemic access to the world. On the other hand, McDowell's own claim that his own theoretical proposal has a Hegelian sound is supported by a previously unexplored argument. I organize my analysis into three parts: I sketch McDowell’s version of disjunctivism (Section 2); I analyze some passages from Hegel that I believe are important for showing some similarities between his and McDowell’s argumentative strategy (Section 3); in the conclusion (Section 4), I highlight a number of core features that Hegel seems to share with McDowell’s disjunctivism and I submit that they are sufficient to label Hegel the “grandfather” of McDowell's disjunctivism.

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“…Before beginning to reconstruct Hegel’s argument in the next section, I will in this section say a bit about his understanding of NKE. For the present purpose, I will restrict myself to a very brief sketch of the outlines of such a reading (for more detail, see Knappik 2016a).…”

Section: Hegel On Natural Kind Essentialismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For Hegel, it is natural to raise this question in the context of NKE because his defence of NKE is part of a project that enquires into the metaphysical preconditions of successful explanations (cf. Knappik 2016a). But, unlike other philosophers who have thought about the nature of explanation, Hegel attempts to answer this question by accounting for what it means to understand or (in his preferred term) comprehend ( begreifen ) something—where ‘understanding’ is to be taken not in the sense of semantic understanding, but of the understanding that is conveyed by an explanation, or an answer to a why-question.…”

Section: Hegel On the Nature Of Understandingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hegel and Arguments for Natural Kind Essentialism

Knappik¹

2018

Hegel Bulletin

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Natural Kind Essentialism (NKE) is the view that the objects of sciences like physics, chemistry and biology fall into natural kinds, and that such kinds have essences—sets of properties possession of which is necessary and sufficient for kind-membership. Since Putnam and Kripke brought NKE back onto the philosophical agenda, it has found many advocates. But comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of how this view can be positively motivated. After illustrating the current need for an argument for NKE through critical discussions of Putnam’s, Kripke’s and Ellis’s arguments for NKE, this article aims to show that Hegel offers the resources for an original argument for the view. This argument works by deriving metaphysical implications from an account of what it means to understand an explanandum.

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Hegel's Essentialism. Natural Kinds and the Metaphysics of Explanation in Hegel's Theory of ‘the Concept’

Cited by 17 publications

References 37 publications

On Origins and Species: Hegel on the Genus-Process

On Origins and Species: Hegel on the Genus-Process

Hegel, grandfather of disjunctivism

Hegel and Arguments for Natural Kind Essentialism

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