Martin Donougho, "Hegel's 'Individuality': Beyond Category"
English | ISBN: 3031213688 | 2023 | 429 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
English | ISBN: 3031213688 | 2023 | 429 pages | EPUB | 2 MB
This book explores an overlooked area in Hegel studies: his use of ‘individuality’ (Individualität). Hegel joined a lively conversation, from Leibniz to Romanticism and beyond, about this novel concept/phenomenon. Successive chapters track Hegel’s engagement, in such texts as the Phenomenology, Encyclopedia, and Aesthetics. Hegel’s system tends to follow a syllogistic logic (universal, particular, singular), but ‘individuality’ departs from the norm. The category enacts a certain pragmatics (as against semantics or syntactics) regarding tacit assumptions at work or implicit terms of address, which requires active participation by a thinking subject charged with discerning individuality (which bars resort to explicit rules). The category reflexively implicates the user even in presuming an objective context.
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