along been in judging and acting—is achieving a distinctive sort of of doing self-consciousness ourselves as normative, rational, beings. geistig One important ancestor of this fundamental distinction between kinds of concepts is division of labor between empirical concepts and the pure concepts of the understanding, Kant’s that is, the categories. Of course, Kant understood the relations between these concepts and metaconcepts somewhat differently: the pure concepts or categories codify in explicit concepts (that is, ones that can themselves figure in judgments) the that are implicitly exhibited by forms all empirically contentful concepts as they figure in (explicit) empirical judgments. That is, in hylomorphic philosophical metametalanguage, the of the pure categorial concepts content Kant’s expresses the of the determinate empirical ones. form But for both figures I think it is good methodological advice to seek to understand the account offered of the metaconcepts to begin with in terms of what they tell us about the use and content of the ground-level concepts. This is not always easy, since both Kant and Hegel spend a more time talking about the lot nature and contents of the concepts they want to use to explicate concept use than they do about concept use itself. So there is a natural temptation to follow their example, and worry more about, say, the deduction of the categories in Kant, or the problem of how to make a beginning and then conduct a progressive exposition of the system of logical concepts in Hegel, than about the picture being presented of how ordinary cognition and action should be conceived. But I think it is important to resist that temptation—at least sometimes—and so to enter this particular
along been doing in judging and acting—is achieving a distinctive sort of self-consciousness of ourselves as normative, rational, geistig beings. One important ancestor of this fundamental distinction between kinds of concepts is Kant’s division of labor between empirical concepts and the pure concepts of the understanding, that is, the categories. Of course, Kant understood the relations between these concepts and metaconcepts somewhat differently: the pure concepts or categories codify in explicit concepts (that is, ones that can themselves figure in judgments) the forms that are implicitly exhibited by all empirically contentful concepts as they figure in (explicit) empirical judgments. That is, in Kant’s hylomorphic philosophical metametalanguage, the content of the pure categorial concepts expresses the form of the determinate empirical ones. But for both figures I think it is good methodological advice to seek to understand the account offered of the metaconcepts to begin with in terms of what they tell us about the use and content of the ground-level concepts. This is not always easy, since both Kant and Hegel spend a lot more time talking about the nature and contents of the concepts they want to use to explicate concept use than they do about concept use itself. So there is a natural temptation to follow their example, and worry more about, say, the deduction of the categories in Kant, or the problem of how to make a beginning and then conduct a progressive exposition of the system of logical concepts in Hegel, than about the picture being presented of how ordinary cognition and action should be conceived. But I think it is important to resist that temptation—at least sometimes—and so to enter this particular
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