Something of Hegel’s phenomenological method may be conveyed by the first few chapters, which are perhaps among its more conventionally philosophical parts (Westphal 2009). Chapters 1 to 3 effectively follow a developmental series of distinct shapes of consciousness—jointly epistemological and ontological attitudes articulated by criteria which are, regarded from one direction, criteria for certain knowledge, and from the other, criteria for the nature of the objects of such knowledge. In chapter 1, the attitude of Sense-certainty takes immediately given perceptual simples—the sort of role played by the so-called sense-data of early twentieth-century analytic epistemology, for example, with which a subject is purportedly acquainted as bare thises—as the fundamental objects known. By following this form of consciousness’s attempts to make these implicit criteria explicit, we are meant to appreciate that any such contents, even the apparently most immediate ones, are in fact grasped conceptually, and so, in Hegel’s terminology, their reception is actually mediated by the concepts with which they are grasped. Hegel is clear that these contents are not merely qualitative simples that are immediately apprehended, but comprehended instances of the conceptual determination of singularity [Einzelheit] (Phen: §91). Such a simple this, then, can also be understood as an instance of what the Medievals discussed as thisness—a general property of an individual thing’s being identical to itself. One might compare Hegel’s point here to that expressed by Kant in his well known claim from Critique of Pure Reason (A51/B75), that without general concepts, intuitions (singular [einzeln] purportedly immediate mental representations), are blind. However, Hegel seems to want to make this point without relying on Kant’s formal distinction between concepts and intuitions as different species of representation. The idea seems to be that for Hegel, the same content can play the roles played by both concepts and intuitions in Kant. (The lessons of this chapter have sometimes been likened to those of Wilfrid Sellars’s famous criticism of the empiricist myth of the given.)