I have gone on at some length about how I see Hegel thinking about ground-level empirical concepts both because this is the semantic issue about which I think he has the most to teach us today and because these views are much less familiar and less discussed, and the attribution of them is accordingly bound to be more controversial, than is the case for his treatments of logical concepts. But the larger point was to motivate a particular program for a critical reading of Hegel by comparing and constrasting his views about ordinary empirical concepts with his views about his own philosophical and logical ones. As I indicated above, I take it that distinctively philosophical, logical, or speculative (a translation common in Hegel’s English versions of Hegel for his the “begreifende”) concepts—including “form determinations of the with which the is principally concerned—have a characteristic Science of Logic Concept” expressive role that is quite different from that of ordinary, nonphilosophical concepts. Their job is not to make explicit how the is (to subserve a function of consciousness) but rather to world make explicit the of making explicit how the world is (to enable and embody a kind of process If I am right in attributing to Hegel the constellation of views about the self-consciousness). metaphysics and epistemology of the semantics of determinate concepts I sketched in the body of this paper—strong semantic pessimism as the expression of a construal of empirical inexhaustibility as necessary conceptual instability, and recollection as the only adequate form of specification of the contents of determinate concepts, respectively—then perhaps one reason these views have not been much remarked on by readers is that what he actually talks Hegel’s about in his official systematic works, the and the is Science of Logic Phenomenology of Mind, exclusively his distinctive concepts. Furthermore, views about the philosophical Hegel’s contents of concepts at one level cannot straightforwardly be carried over to the concepts proper to the other level.
I have gone on at some length about how I see Hegel thinking about ground-level empirical concepts both because this is the semantic issue about which I think he has the most to teach us today and because these views are much less familiar and less discussed, and the attribution of them is accordingly bound to be more controversial, than is the case for his treatments of logical concepts. But the larger point was to motivate a particular program for a critical reading of Hegel by comparing and constrasting his views about ordinary empirical concepts with his views about his own philosophical and logical ones. As I indicated above, I take it that Hegel’s distinctively philosophical, logical, or speculative (a translation common in English versions of Hegel for his “begreifende”) concepts—including the “form determinations of the Concept” with which the Science of Logic is principally concerned—have a characteristic expressive role that is quite different from that of ordinary, nonphilosophical concepts. Their job is not to make explicit how the world is (to subserve a function of consciousness) but rather to make explicit the process of making explicit how the world is (to enable and embody a kind of self-consciousness). If I am right in attributing to Hegel the constellation of views about the metaphysics and epistemology of the semantics of determinate concepts I sketched in the body of this paper—strong semantic pessimism as the expression of a construal of empirical inexhaustibility as necessary conceptual instability, and recollection as the only adequate form of specification of the contents of determinate concepts, respectively—then perhaps one reason these views have not been much remarked on by Hegel’s readers is that what he actually talks about in his official systematic works, the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology of Mind, is exclusively his distinctive philosophical concepts. Furthermore, Hegel’s views about the contents of concepts at one level cannot straightforwardly be carried over to the concepts proper to the other level.
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