We are glad to announce the one-day workshop on «Examining Hegel’s Idea of Essence: Reflexion, Ground and Appearance» which will take place at the University of Warwick on the 1st of June 2018.
The workshop is organized by Filip Niklas, Edmund Smith, Mert Can Yirmibes and Ahilleas Rokni.
Between the confirmed speakers there are Prof. Dietmar Heidemann (Luxemburg), Dr. Burkhard Nonnemacher (Tübingen), Dr. Michela Bordignon (Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo), Anne Clausen (Göttingen).
If you would like to present a talk, please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words, specifying broadly what your talk will focus on and what its strategies are, by no later than April 1st to: hegelwarwick(at)gmail.com
Call for abstract
Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence forms the second and middle part of his Science of Logic, holding in his ontology the paradoxical yet central position of being the result of the first part (Doctrine of Being) and the transition into the third and final part (Doctrine of the Concept). Although the Logic has historically suffered from shallow appropriations or scholarly neglect, the case is ostensibly much worse for the notoriously difficult treatise concerning essence. Yet, in response to earlier (and later) traditions, Essence is arguably the sphere of thought that best responds to the kind of queries Hegel’s critics and interlocutors have in mind when they hasten to question the nature of the beginning of the Logic. The idea of presupposition: that something can be produced as that which is not-produced, or mediated as not-mediated. How is positing not invariably tied to what is doing the positing, such that thought cannot but infect everything it thinks with its own structure? Does Hegel’s project accommodate here for the conceptual structures of his critics, and is he successful at that?
The workshop aims to closely examine the logical structures that are developed in the first two parts of Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence – Essence as Reflexion Within and Appearance. Exegetical papers are principally preferred, but we also welcome contributions that are engaged jointly in Hegel’s notion of essence and essence in other philosophical traditions.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
- The transition from being to essence
- Shine and Reflexion
- Positing and Presupposing
- External and Immanent Reflexion
- The Determinations of Reflexion (Identity, Difference, etc.)
- Ground and Grounded
- Form, Matter and Content
- Concrete Existence
- Appearance
- The Thing and its Properties
- Force and Expression
- Whole and Parts
- Inner and Outer
