Ok, well, this is one of my favorite parts of the book. I really like this chapter and I think really

important things are going on in it, so I’m going to try and explain the source of my enthusiasm

about it.

So one thing that’s potentially a little puzzling right at the beginning of the chapter is that Hegel

talks indifferently and almost interchangeably about universality, negation, and mediation. So he

says things like in 112, the second paragraph, “The wealth of sense knowledge belongs to

perception, not to immediate certainty, for which it was only the source of instances. For only

perception contains negation. That is, difference or manifoldness within its own essence.” And

he talks about it in 115, about sensuous universality or the immediate unity of being and the

negative. And then again says “the universal is in its simplicity a mediated universal.”

Now I talked a little bit beforehand about the relation between determinate negation and

mediation, where I take mediation to be a matter of inference, material/consequential relations,

determinate negation to be a relation of material incompatibility, Aristotelian contrariety, which

will be a big topic here, and in particular I indicated that I take negation to be the more

fundamental notion, in part because, though I can’t catch Hegel saying this, it’s possible to

define inferential relations in terms of relations of determinate negation. That is, we can say that

‘Pedro is a mammal’ follows from ‘Pedro is a donkey’, because and in the sense that everything

incompatible with Pedro being a mammal is incompatible with him being a donkey. That’s a way

of going from a notion of material incompatibility to a notion of inference. P implies Q just in

case everything incompatible with Q is incompatible with P. So if we give Hegel a notion of

determinate negation as a sort of metaphysical primitive, he’s going to get a notion of mediation

out of it.

But what about universality? One of the big points of this chapter is to argue that coming out of

sense-certainty with an acknowledgement that determinate contentfulness requires universals,

some kind of generality, in particular sense universals, observable properties, ones that can be

applied immediately in the sense of immediacy of origin, that the application of these universals

was not the result of a process of inference, but a matter of observation, perception,

responsiveness in that way. One of the points of the chapter is to argue that in finding that the

presence or activity of sense universals is implicit in the idea of sensory episodes that have some

kind of determinate content we actually already have conceded a structure of negation that

universality implicitly involves a rich metaphysical fine structure of negation. I’m going to argue

that there’s two fundamental kinds of differences that Hegel sees as necessary for having any

kind of universality in play, having any notion of, well any notion of universality in play, and

he’s going to walk us through how we can elaborate five other senses of difference or negation

out of those fundamental two.

A different way of describing this same progression, a way that will turn out to be equivalent, is

that in the sense-certainty section, the contents we were talking about, not themselves thought of

as linguistic contents, but when we, as we have no choice, use language to try and specify these

contents, we use what’s Strawson in his book Individuals called a feature-placing language. So

feature-placing, when we say ‘It’s raining’ or ‘It’s fine’, because the language has a subject-

predicate structure, the surface structure of sentences like that is also subject-predicate, but you

can see that’s just the surface structure. The ‘it’ in ‘It’s raining’ or ‘It’s fine’ is not referring to

something. There’s not an object of which we’re predicating this universal. Rather it’s just a

feature. We’re saying ‘There is rain’, ‘There is sun’, ‘It’s sunny’, something like that. And we

say it exactly the same in German, ‘Es regnet’, and Strawson’s idea is that this is the most

primitive sort of contentfulness. In feature-placing you just characterize it. You’re just placing

this feature.

And Strawson, in Individuals, engaged in a self-describedly Kantian exercise in what he calls

reconstructive metaphysics, by contrast to descriptive metaphysics. He’s interested in how you

could move beyond feature-placing content to a subject and predicate, individual and property

structure, where you’ve still got the kind of universality you’ve got in feature-placing, those are

repeatables, contentful repeatables—to say it’s raining is different than to say it’s fine or it’s

sunny. Those are different. But now you add individuals, or particulars, or objects into the

picture and Strawson was concerned—well, what’s required to get those in the picture and

started thinking, well, this was his Kantian argument, you’re going to need something like space

and time to locate them in and you’re going to need the capacity to track those objects, to follow

them as they move through space.

And this is a line that his student and the young John McDowell’s best friend, Gareth Evans

elaborated in his work, saying really there’s two notions of space. He’s elaborating what

Strawson made of Kant in the Transcendental Aesthetic, Evans collaborating with Strawson

made of Kant, says it’s really two kind of space you’ve got to keep track of: ego-centric space,

located around you—how are things relative to you—and public space, the public space that

things move in. And you’ve got to be able to separate the effects of movement, in particular of

your movement, that is the relative change between egocentric space and public space, in order

to so much as have the idea of independent objects moving around in public space. You’ve got to

know the difference between what happens when you turn your head and what happens when an

object moves in public space, even though both of them involve shifts in how things are relative

— in egocentric space, for instance. and Evans is fascinated that this is a sub-conceptual capacity

at least in the sense that if your dog can catch a Frisbee, he’s got to have these fundamental

capacities of tracking objects, of mapping egocentric space onto public space, that Evan’s

Strawson’s Kant see as fundamental, but sub-conceptual capacities. So, all right, that’s a little of

what Sellars called being around in the neighborhood, neighboring bushes around the

Strawsonian idea of feature-placing language.

So Strawson in Individuals sets himself the task of trying to see what sort of practical capacities

knowers and agents would have to have to move from feature-placing consciousness to subject

and predicate consciousness, to consciousness of individuals as the subjects of properties, where

now we could say ‘This stone is warm and this stone is cold’. We move beyond the feature-

placing, just ‘It’s sunny’ or ‘It’s rainy’.

And what Hegel is going to argue in the “Perception” chapter is that everything you need to

make that transition is already implicit in the feature-placing language, the feature-placing

contents, if you just realize that there’s two ways in which the features can differ. They can

either be merely different in the way in which night— ‘It’s night’ and ‘It’s raining’ are different.

Or they can be exclusively different, in the way in which ‘It’s night’ and ‘It’s day’ are different,

or ‘It’s raining’ and ‘It’s sunny’ are different.

He’s going to argue first that to see even the feature-placing things that we inherit from sense-

certainty as determinately contentful, we’ve got to distinguish those two kinds of difference. And

then in I just think a tour de force of an argument, he argues give him that difference between

two kinds of differences and he’ll show how to build the full structure of objects and properties,

particulars and universals out of it. I’m going to just for purposes of short-hand call that structure

that’s beyond feature-placing, instead of calling a subject/predicate structure, I’m just going to

call it the Aristotelian categorial structure and I’ll say why I think that should be pinned on

Aristotle later in the development.

So Hegel’s got to show us that there’s a complex fine-structure to the notion of universality even

as it applies in feature-placing that is articulated by negation. So universality involves negation.

In the metaphysics that will explicitly be pursued in the science of logic, in this book,

determinate negation is a basic notion in terms of which we’re going to understand mediation,

that is inferential relations, and it’s the basic notion in terms of which we’re going to understand

universality. So although we can keep separate books on these notions, they’re intimately related

and this is the fundamental term.

Now I think maybe the easiest way into Hegel’s thought here is to think about the dawn of logic

in Aristotle, the dawn of the notion of formal logic. And this is something I know very little

about. My understanding of the history of philosophy basically starts with Descartes. I mean,

I’ve read these guys, I have views about them, but I don’t have the kind of control of them that

will let me, put me in a position really to stand behind things I say about guys any deader than

Descartes. But you know people who do and, in particular James Allen is one of the world’s

authorities on the origins of logic in Aristotle and downhill from there, so if you’re interested in

pursuing this, you can do so responsibly. Just don’t ask me. But let me say parenthetically, when

I was a graduate student, Gil Harman was notorious among the graduate students as the most

unhistorical philosopher it was possible to be. And this was on the basis of things like his advice

that it was a complete waste of time to read any philosophy written more than five years ago,

because if whatever was in the older stuff was important it would have been talked about in the

last five years and you should start with where the discussion is now, not where it was back then.

And it was only some years later that I realized this was a slander on him and that in fact

everything Harman did was rooted in his sense of the history of philosophy and grew out of his

reading of the history of philosophy. It was just that he believed it began with Quine. Anyway,

my sense is only driven slightly farther back to Descartes as well I’m confessing a shameful

truth.

Ok, but Aristotle, who room has it, started off with a distinction between two kinds of difference,

between contraries and contradictories. So contraries are things like square and circular,

universals that cannot apply to the same thing at the same time. Contradictories, like square and

not square, also cannot apply to the same thing at the same time, but each property only has one

contradictory, but it can have many contraries. So with red you only get not-red as the

contradictory, but it’s got all the other colors as contraries, red, green, and so on. And Aristotle

bequeathed us the square of opposition, relating contradictories, contraries, by negation and so

on. You’ve seen all this in baby logic courses. Some of you are probably teaching—well, we

probably don’t teach it, but at any rate you’re generally familiar with this.

There’s two main strategies that one could have for thinking about this difference between

contraries and contradictories. The tradition we grew up in, the tradition of modern mathematical

logic that starts with Frege, as codified by Russell and in particular on down to Tarski, so I’m

going to call this the Tarskian order of explanation, doesn’t start with the notion of properties. It

starts with the notion of objects and begins it’s thinking about logic with merely different

objects, a domain of objects about which all we know is which ones are the same and which ones

are different. They’re merely numerically different. It’s a domain of objects. And identifies

properties, to begin with, just with sets of objects. Red is its extension, a set of red objects.

Square is the set of square objects. And low and behold, our domain might have something that’s

both red and square. It’s in the intersection of those properties. Given that notion, we can define

a contradictory property. The contradictory property not-red is the property that’s exhibited by

all and only the objects that aren’t red.

(Writing on the board.) So we’ve got our domain with all of its merely different objects, you can

think of them as points, because points are all just alike except you can count them. We’ve got

this domain and we have a property of being red, it’s just the set of those, and not-red is the set

of everything that isn’t in there. And now we can say that something, say blue, is a contrary of

red in case it implies not-red. So we’re going to define contrariety from contradictoriness. We

use the notion of the complementary set of merely different objects to get a notion of formal

negation, which lets us define the contradictory property not red. And then we can say, well look

blue over here, every object that’s in that set is in the not-red set so it’s a contrary, whereas

square here—it doesn’t follow from being square that something is not-red. This one is square,

but it’s red, so square is not a contrary property to red. We’re building up a notion of contrariety

starting with merely distinct objects introducing a notion of formal negation to introduce the

notion of a contradictory and then treating contraries of a property P, Q counts as a contrary of

property P just in case Q implies not-P. That’s the way Tarskian model theory does things.

Let me say some more in the vicinity here. So Tarskian model theory has as the points of

evaluation, relational structures. And a relational structure is just a domain, and we’ll just worry

about the properties for now, a set of sets on it, which are understood as the extensions of

properties. Formal negation is defined—unlike any ordinary property—is defined by a function

or a constraint on interpretation that applies to all the points of the evaluation, all the relational

structures. It says no matter which relational structure you look at, no matter which domain and

which set of sets on that domain you look at, to be the contradictory of the property associated

with any one of these is to be the set that is the complement of that set in the domain. So

negation is a kind of function. From a point of evaluation, a relational structure, a predicate, it

gives you a way of constructing another predicate, which is its contradictory. And that works no

matter what point of evaluation you have. If you want to follow a contrary, if you want to follow

blue from one point of evaluation, from one relational structure to another, you’re not

automatically told how to do that. You’re what a contrary, let’s say you can follow red as having

a different domain in this relational structure than it has in this one, and the rule for contradictory

tells you how to compute the extension of its contradictory property not-red, and then it will tell

you what it is for some other extension in there to be the extension of a contrary property,

namely to be one that implies not-red, but it won’t tell you how to sort of follow the contraries

from one world to another.

This structure—I think of it as a bottom up structure, starting with the merely different objects,

going through formal negation to define contradictories, and then from there to contraries—this

is the one on which the Kripke/Lewis/Stalknaker possible worlds semantics is then built.

Possible worlds semantics differs from Tarskian model theory in a couple of essential ways. One

of them is that the points of evaluation are not thought of as relational structures anymore, but as

possible worlds. Now for a long time, people didn’t think that difference was a big difference.

And you’ll see a lot of fairly recent literature that ignores the distinction between possible worlds

and models.

One impassioned plea for keeping them separate is John Etchemendy’s book The Concept of

Logical Consequence, which argues that we don’t understand logical consequence precisely

because we’ve run together some model theoretic considerations and some possible worlds

considerations. Roughly, thinking of logical consequence on the one hand as consequence in all

models and on the other hand as consequence such that it’s impossible that the premises be true

and the conclusion not true. And he sees systematic argumentative slides between those two, he

argues, quite separate conceptions, where they come apart, you know, we don’t know what to

say.

But his is not the only such plea. I would say the fundamental difference between thinking in

terms of relational structures, as you do in Tarskian model theory, and thinking about possible

worlds, as you do in the possible worlds semantic framework, is that by definition relational

structures come with domains. You know what all the objects in the relational structure are—

they’re domain elements. On almost everybody’s conception of possible worlds, the actual world

is a possible world. But what’s its domain? I mean, you can by brute force say, “Well, it’s a

relational structure. God told me that I guess. So there must be domain elements so that

everything else is a matter of sets of those.” So David Lewis transcendentally deduces the

existence of fundamental particles and says what’s in his possible worlds is those fundamental

particles and all their mereological sums. Right, mereology is a less-commitive sort of set theory.

But possible worlds as initially conceived, they don’t come with domains. You can’t count

everything in a possible world. There’d be no definite totality of things in them.

Now, this is a bit of an excursus, but I think it’s worth it and if this is all old hat to you, think

about something interesting while I’m telling this story. So the modal revolution really came in

three waves. The first was Kripke’s furnishing of a complete semantics for all of the C. I. Lewis

axiomatic systems of modal logic by treating necessity- by introducing an accessibility operator

between possible worlds, treating necessity as truth in all accessible worlds, and possibility as

truth in some possible world, and then pointing out that if you varied the algebraic properties of

the accessibility relation you could get the different C. I. Lewis systems. You’d get S4 if you

treat the accessibility relation as transitive. You would get S5 if you treated it as reflexive,

transitive, and reflexive and so on. So he gave us a semantics for these modal logical systems

that had been studied axiomatically since 1912, when C. I. Lewis came up with them.

Parenthetically, Kripke was 14 when he did this, sent the proof in to Acta Philosophica Fennica,

a finished journal, which they say good thing about the internet is no one knows you’re a dog,

you know nobody knew he was a 14 year-old kid when he sent this thing in, they just knew he

had a proof, a bunch of proofs. So Kripke showed how to use possible worlds to give a complete

semantics for modal logic, indeed for every modal logic anybody really knew anything about at

the time, though we’ve found ones that you need something else for since. So but all that was

doing was interpreting modal operators in this framework, didn’t have anything to say about the

meanings of non-logical expressions.

In the second wave, and here there’s a lot of people one could mention, but David Lewis, Bob

Stalnaker, and, until his young life was cut short, Richard Montague used this framework to

extend Kripke’s results to give a semantics for non-logical expressions. And they said, well, we

could understand a property like red as semantically corresponding to a function from possible

worlds to sets of objects. So in each world there’s the set of red things. That’s the extension of

red in that world. But the property is the function that assigns to each world the set of red things

in it. It’s an intension, a function from points of evaluation, possible worlds, to extensions. David

Lewis, in his classic article “General Semantics” showed how this gave us a recipe for assigning

semantic interpretants with a power and precision that had hitherto been undreamed of.

(Writing on the board.) So in the possible worlds version of it, here we’ve got terms that are

assigned to objects at points of evaluation, because they’re extensions, and functions from points

of evaluation to extensions as their intension. So the term’ Barack Obama’ is assigned to as its

extension in this world Barack Obama and as it’s intension a function that in each world picks

out the individual who is Barack Obama if he exists in that world. Syntactically you can think of

a one-place predicate like walks as something that if you give it a singular term will give you

back a sentence. So if you give the predicate ‘walks’ ‘Barack Obama’ as its input it’ll give you

‘Barack Obama walks’, a sentence as its <word obscured by coughing>. And what these guys’

brilliant idea was how semantically what you should assign as the interpretant of a one-place

predicate is a function from the semantic interpretant of singular terms to the interpretant of

sentences. So a sentence is interpreted as the set of possible worlds in which it’s true. And the

term is assign a function from possible worlds to objects. So ‘walks’ is going to be a function

from functions from possible worlds to objects to sets of possible worlds.

(Still writing on the board.) Now we also have operators that take one-place predicates and turn

them into one-place predicates. Those are adverbs like ‘slowly’ that turns ‘walks’ into ‘walks

slowly.’ And what Lewis saw is this general apparatus gives us a way to assign the right kind of

semantic interpretant to this. If we’re going to— I’ll just assume that we can follow objects from

world to world and so say this is interpreted by a function from objects to sets of possible worlds,

namely from the object to the set of possible worlds in which it has the property. Then to an

adverb like ‘slowly’ we have to assign a function from functions from objects to sets of possible

worlds to functions from objects to sets of possible worlds. The function from objects to sets of

possible worlds that assigns an object to a set of worlds in which it walks to the ones in which it

assigns it the set of objects in which it walks slowly. And now if you notice that semantically

adverbs come in two flavors, attributive and non-attributive adverbs. So if I buttered the toast

slowly, I buttered the toast. If I buttered the toast in the kitchen, I buttered the toast. But if I

buttered the toast in my imagination, it doesn’t follow that I buttered the toast. So some of these

transformations take you to properties such that it follows from the application of this that you

still have this property, and other ones it doesn’t. Well, now, when you semantically interpret

this adverb as a function from objects to sets of possible worlds to objects to sets of possible

worlds—to functions from sets of possible worlds, now you can actually represent this inferential

semantic difference between attributive and non-attributive adverbs. And no one had ever been

able to do semantics with that kind of power and precision before the late ‘60s when apparatus

came up. And Lewis called his article “General Semantics” because he said, you know it doesn’t

depend on what you take the semantic interpretants of these things to be. This apparatus is

general, or better neutral, between those. If you’re Michael Dummett, you think you should

semantically interpret singular terms not by objects but by sets of recognition conditions for

objects, the conditions under which he could recognize the ‘lark’ set. And he thinks that you

shouldn’t semantically interpret sentences by sets of possible worlds or by truth-conditions, but

by assertability conditions. Ok, that’s a philosophical disagreement, but this apparatus doesn’t

care about that difference, it says well then a Dummanian (?) adverb is going to semantically

interpreted by a function from functions from recognition conditions to assertability conditions to

functions recognition conditions to assertability conditions. So in “General Semantics”, Lewis

gives us a way of getting the power of this new intensional semantics no matter what we

semantically associate with these different kind of expressions. And that’s really when modern

formal semantics took off.

Ok, Hegel doesn’t note that. <Laughter> This happens— well, you’d be surprised, but he does,

but not that. But this second wave of the modal revolution was moving beyond Kripke’s

semantics for modal logical opperators to a semantics for any non-logical expressions and that

was a huge advance. The third wave of the modal revolution was initiated by “Naming and

Necessity” and taught us about a priority, necessity, and, this newfangled thing, metaphysical

necessity in a sense that we had never had before. My personal view is that was a bridge too far

and we should have stayed with the second wave, but that’s prejudice.

Ok, so what does all this have to do with Hegel? One way of thinking about the relation between

contraries and contradictories starts with merely different objects, understands properties as sets

of those merely different objects, so the properties are different if the objects that they’re sets of

are different—that’s how you individuate sets, just by what’s in them—then defines formal

negation by a complementary operation, so the contradictory of a property P, say red, is the

property that’s exhibited by all and only the objects that don’t exhibit red. And then you can

define contraries as something is a contrary, some property Q is a contrary of P if exhibiting Q

implies exhibiting non-P. So that’s all Tarski, made particularly precise and explicit in Tarskian

model theory, we build on top of that a possible worlds semantics and now what we do in the

possible worlds semantics is look at functions from points of evaluation to extensions which is

how we define negation. Negation is the same in all models. It means the same thing. You

compute the contradictory of a property the same way in all models. Well, you compute the

meaning of the adverb or the extension of the adverb the same in all models. Really, what the

second wave of the modal revolution was doing is extending the treatment that Tarski had given

to purely logical expressions to non-logical expressions. And now you could say something like

well there’s no world in which something is at the same time both red all over and blue all over.

That’s something you can say now in a way that in Tarskian model theory all you could do is

restrict the set of models in some completely arbitrary way, whereas now we say oh, that’s part

of the meaning of red and blue is that you track them across the worlds in such a way that

nothing ever had both of those whereas red and square are not like that

So this is a very powerful notion and you get a perfectly reasonable interpretation of contrariety

at the end of the day when you built up in this way. What Hegel has is a completely different

way of thinking about this relationship. He says start with the notion of contrary properties.

That’s the notion of determinate negation. Blue is a contrary of red. They stand in the relation of

determinate negation. Why is it determinate? Well, because it’s different from the way green

stands to red. They’re both contraries. Abstractly they have that in common, but they’re

determinately different. There’s more than one of them and you can pick out one of the

contraries—blue by contradistinction from green, so you can treat something as— Ok so if you

start with this notion of determinate negation which is a relation of Aristotelian contrariety,

where any property can have many contraries though it has only one contradictory—remember

we started with the notion of objects, built up contradictories, and eventually got to contraries in

the Tarskian and the Kripke/Lewis/Stalnaker (KLS) extension of the Tarskian model theoretic

apparatus—Hegel’s going to say well, what is formal negation, not-red? That’s what’s implied

by every contrary of red. So if something is blue, it follows that it’s not red. If it’s green, it

follows that it’s not red. The contradictory for Hegel is the minimum contrary, minimum in the

sense that it’s the one that’s implied by all the contraries. Furthermore, we can understand that

implication in terms of contrariety. Remember I said you can define P implying Q if everything

incompatible with Q is incompatible with P. So in terms of that notion of material

incompatibility we define contradictoriness. We’re doing this still at the level of properties. But

this is turning the Tarskian scheme on its head. We’re going from contrariety to contradictoriness

instead of the other way around. And from Hegel’s point of view, the notion of formal negation

has thrown away all the content, all the determinateness, because you’ve thrown away

everything that all the contraries don’t have in common. What all the contraries have in common

is just being not-red and, from that point of view, you can’t see the determinate differences

between them, the difference between green and blue and yellow and so on. So he’s going to say

formal negation is the poorest emptiest kind of negation. But furthermore, what he’s going to go

on to do next is build up the rest of the Aristotelian object-property structure, which the Tarskian

and KLS approach has a good story about, but he’s going to have a completely different order of

explanation. And that’s the story that we get in “Perception”. I haven’t said how that story goes

yet. But let me stop there for comments or questions so far.

So I’m saying that the way in is to think of the Aristotelian distinction between negation in the

sense of contraries, determinate negation, and negation in the sense of formal negation,

contradictoriness and see there’s two orders of explanation one could pursue. Aristotle doesn’t

pursue either one of them. He just treats these as two different things and looks at what we can

do with both of them, but the Tarskian order of explanation treats contradictoriness as prior,

explains it in terms of mere difference of domain objects, and the Hegelian one is going to take

determinate negation to be its primitive, semantically, logically, ontologically, and

metaphysically. It’s going to take that to be the primary notion. And just as we saw you can get

mediation out of that, you can get implication relations, so we can see you can get a notion of

formal negation. The contradictory is the minimum contrary in the sense of the one that’s

implied by all the contraries.

Jack: So we talked a couple weeks ago about how— Well, I asked about the argument for why

we should think that you can reduce content or mediation to determinate negation rather than just

— clearly you have to acknowledge that they necessitate each other but why we have to take that

further step of saying that it just consists of determinate negation. So I’m wondering if this is

what you take to be the argument and it’s something like an inference to the best explanation,

you know. Look at how much I can get out of starting with just one primitive.

Bob: I mean, he’s going to have a lot more things to say about negation as the metaphysical

essence of everything that there is—of thought and of being as well. But I think at the end of the

day is give me this and look how much I can build out of this one primitive. He’ll offer other

arguments, but you have to start somewhere and I think the things he needs to appeal to for those

arguments are all more controversial than the fact of this constructability that he’s going to do.

So I think the way of thinking of it is sort of implicit in the way I’ve presented it here—well,

we’ve got one familiar way of thinking about things, incorporated in the Tarskian picture, get

stereoscopic vision by thinking the same material through, taking another path through it, and

compare and contrast.

Student 1: Another question back from the dead. How does that tricky concept of sublation fit

into this? And I might ask to look at paragraph 113 more closely to figure that out.

Bob: Yeah, so far not at all. I mean, it’s going to be involved in— I mean, I will get to 113 and

when we can talk about it, but when I said Hegel’s going to argue that the whole Aristotelian

structure of objects and properties is implicit already in acknowledging a kind of generality even

at the feature-placing level that acknowledges that the universal, that universal, that kind of

generality is determinate in a sense that distinguishes these two kinds of difference, what he calls

mere or indifferent difference, like red and square are different in that sense, and exclusive

difference, that’s the determinate negation. Give him that, everything else is implicit in that.

That’s going to be an aufhebung, translated or labelled as sublation in the translation.

So ok. Let me say how this goes. Well, here’s a bit of commentary before I do this. Michael

Friedman, building on work by Jaakko Hintikka, has given us an astonishing revelation about

Kant, that essential features of the first critique come out of the years that Kant spent meditating

on the proof structure of Euclid’s elements in which he realized that there were a number of

conceptual arguments in Euclid’s Elements, arguments that could be reconstructed in a

syllogistic way or as we could put it, you know the syllogism seems outdated, that you could

represent with Venn diagrams inclusions and exclusions of concepts, but there was a class of

arguments that couldn’t be represented that way. These are, not by coincidences—well, these are

arguments like the argument that for any line segment there is a midpoint to it, which if you

think about Euclid, he says take some circles that have the end points as centers and they’ll

intersect in exactly two places—we’ve already proved that, Euclid says—and construct the line.

That line will be, we will show, perpendicular, but it will also, we’re going to show, bisect the

segment. You can always perform these constructions, so there always is a midpoint of two lines.

That’s not an argument that you can reconstruct in syllogistic terms. It’s not an argument that

you can represent in terms of Venn diagrams. Kant says, well it’s a matter of construction, rather

than extracting conceptual inference or consequences. You’re constructing the midpoint. And

that’s the way of course that infinite totalities come into geometry, because if every— if we can

perform this construction on every segment, we can bisect it, then we can bisect the half and we

can bisect that, and we can, by this construction, determine an infinite totality. So these notions

of arguments of infinity and by construction, those are not conceptual arguments. You don’t get

them by logic. You get them some other way. And Kant’s name for how you get them is

synthesis. Synthesis, some of it’s conceptual and some of it’s not. Some of it’s intuitive

synthesis. Now what— so, people had known that it was specifically by looking at argument in

Euclid’s elements that Kant had come to think of the intellect as having this non-conceptual,

constructive element, which was the only grip we have on infinity. You have to construct these

things synthetically in intuition. It’s not a matter of the concepts.

What Hintikka realized is that these are exactly the arguments that involve iterated, alternating

quantifiers. For all..., there exists.... For every line segment there is a center point. That’s what

you can’t represent in a Venn diagram, a relation between two sets such that for every point in

this one there is a point in this one such that.... That the Venn diagram isn’t set for. Traditional

logic couldn’t handle that. We needed to introduce, Frege needed to introduce quantifiers in

order to get arguments that involved these alternating quantifiers, but particularly the for

all...there exists... So this is why traditional logic couldn’t handle instances like ‘If someone

admires everyone, then someone admires himself’, to see that that was a good inference. Ok, so

look, Kant realized that the expressive power of traditional logic didn’t extend to exactly the

things that we would add the expressive power to represent with quantificational logic. So he put

something else in there—synthesis.

Now what Friedman realized is that what Kant was doing is exactly like an alternate form of

quantificational reasoning, one that uses Skolem functions, due to the logician Skolem. (Writing

on the board.) And what he realized is that these tough inferences that involve alternating

quantifiers <coughing and turning pages obscures words> two universals or two existentials

becomes collapsible into one and just have an ordinary pair of stuff. It’s these alternating ones

where new stuff happens. Instead of saying that, you could just have a function which goes from

one of these and gives you this one. This says “for every f, there is a g”, but if you had a function

such that if you gave it an f, it would give you a g as the consequence, you could do everything

that you can do with these alternating quantifiers, you could do that with Skolem functions

instead. And furthermore, the Skolem functions do it by—what?—by constructing this one. They

determine the particular. This just says there is one, but the Skolem function actually gives you

one. It’s a way of constructing them. And what Friedman realizes in the second chapter of his

book on Kant and the exact sciences is Skolem functions are exactly what Kant’s intuitive

syntheses do. It’s the same conceptual apparatus. He not only saw in Euclid’s elements that there

was a class of arguments that couldn’t be represented in traditional logic, he came up with a

construction in intuition method that basically was Skolem functions which are expressively as

powerful as our quantificational apparatus.

If I’d had an idea like that about Kant I would die and go to heaven. That would be it. I think the

scales fall from our eyes when we see this, but what I want to say is in the wake of this Friedman

and Hintikka sequential discovery and sort reconstrual of what’s going on we see that the twenty

years that Kant spent thinking about the proof structure of Euclid’s elements yielded this

incredible result. Well, that’s the same way Hegel concentrated on Aristotle on contraries and

contradictories. And I think what he came up with from that is no less remarkable than what

Kant came up with, which it’s taken us two hundred years to see exactly what it was, but you

know that’s the way it goes when you make these big moves. And I think something of that order

of magnitude came out of Hegel’s meditations on Aristotle here, specifically on contraries and

contradictories. So, I don’t know, I’ll stop there. This is again a bit of a byway, but yeah.

Anyway I recommend the Friedman chapter.

Ok. Here’s the way I think Hegel’s story goes and I’d like us to get sort of clear on how that

works as I’m telling the story and then we’ll go read some of the passages and try and catch him

saying these things. So how is it that this whole Aristotelian structure of objects characterized by

properties, and I still haven’t justified calling it that yet, is implicit in the difference between

these two kinds of differences, or the difference between these two kinds of negation? Well, we

start off with the idea that what makes a property the determinate property that it is the relations

of exclusive difference that it stands in to other ones, that a property is the determinate property

that it is because of its position in the space of contraries.

That’s already to say that universality, being a determinate property, is articulated by relations of

negation, of exclusive negation. And, I mean I should say the terms Hegel uses for these.

‘Exclusive difference’ is ‘ausschließender Unterschied’. That’s literally exclusive—

ausschließen is to rule out and it’s probably worth keeping in mind that the term for drawing a

consequence in German is ‘schließen’ and an inference is a ‘Schluß’, which is the result of doing

that. But ausschließen, ruling out, it’s ausschließende, difference. That’s the exclusive

difference. And he says it’s mere, bloße, or indifferent, gleichgültige, difference is the kind of

difference that there is between red and square, where they’re not contraries. All right, but it’s

these modally robust exclusive differences that determine, that articulate the contents of

determinate properties or universals. Hegel will invoke, in other places, the Spinozistic doctrine

“Omnis determinatio est negatio”, “All determination is negation”. Something’s determined

insofar as it has a limit, beyond it it’s not. That’s what it is to be determinate. And he’s adding to

Spinoza’s doctrine—yeah, and that’s exclusive negation, not mere negation. But there’s already

a sense in which the identity of a property consists in its differences from other properties. Its

unity, its self-relation, he’ll say, not entirely helpfully, depends on its relation to other things;

indeed, consists in. What it is, consists in its relation to other things. And one of the overarching

intellectual tasks that he set himself is to try and understand this kind of identity that consists in

differences. And what we see here is his exploring the fine structure of those differences.

So we said if we start with exclusive difference, we’ve seen we can get material consequences

and we’ve seen we can get contradictories. We can get merely formal negation out of exclusive

negation. And here we get a category, determinate properties or universals, officially all we’ve

got is sense universals, coming out of sense certainty, whose identity consists in their exclusive

differences from each other. That’s the first level. But now when we ask, well what do you mean

by exclusive differences? What is the difference between exclusive difference and mere

differences? Well, we see there has to be a unit of account. Exclusive differences are those that

one unit can’t have both of, whereas mere differences are ones that one unit of account can have

both of. Implicit in the distinction between exclusive and indifferent difference is the idea of a

unit of account, which is going to be objects, particulars, things, thinghood in general he says

here. But without that unit of account you can’t make sense of that difference between two kinds

of difference. I mean, you can just think of them as, again, points of evaluation, but one point of

evaluation can’t have two exclusively different properties associated with it, but it can have two

merely indifferent ones. Only if you’ve got those points of evaluation or units of account can you

make sense of that difference between two kinds of differences. Well, those units of account are

categorially different from properties. Properties we can only make sense of as an ontological

category by their relation to something that isn’t properties but is a unit of account for keeping

track of the exclusive or mere difference between properties. So here’s a second sense in which

the identity of the property consists in its difference. Now it’s the difference categorially, the

inter-categorial difference between properties and objects. We started off with the intra-

categorial difference, exclusive differences between properties, but now that we see that those

come in the two flavors, exclusive and indifferent, we’ve got to acknowledge something that

isn’t a property, but is a unit of account for them.

Now let’s think about those units of account for a minute. They by the very process by which we

have uncovered them, extracted what was implicit in the idea of a difference between these two

kinds of difference, they can stand in two different kinds of relations to properties. On the one

hand, they are what Hegel will call the also or the medium in which properties that are only

indifferently different are associated. So ‘The salt is white and it’s cubical and it’s tart’, that’s the

also, being the medium of indifferently different, merely different, compatibly different

properties. But it’s equally essential to being an object that they’re the units of account that

exclude exclusively different properties. That is, because I’m host to white, I can’t be host to red

and black and so on. Because I’m host to cubical, I can’t be host to spherical and so on. So on the

one hand there’s a principle of inclusion of properties and on the other hand a principle of

exclusion of properties. To be an object you’ve got to play both those roles. That difference

between two relations that the objects can have to properties, that’s essential to what it is to be an

object, that it stands in an inclusive also relation to some properties and an exclusive relation to

other properties. That difference between its two kinds of relation to properties is of the essence

of what it is to be an object or a particular.

So not only is it essential categorially to objects that they be related to properties, but

furthermore that they have these two different and opposed relations to properties is essential to

what it is to be an object or a particular. So now we’ve got the intra-categorial differences,

exclusive differences among properties, in virtue of which they’re determinately contentful; the

inter-categorial difference between objects and properties, in virtue of which properties are what

they are an objects are what they are; and we’ve got the difference within the object, within the

category of objects now in two different relations that it stands to properties, which is an

essential part of being of the category it is, of being an object. Now we can turn the crank one

more time. And this is an argument that Hegel takes from Aristotle. We said we can construct

from the notion of contrariety, from the notion of exclusive difference or determinate negation,

we can construct the notion of formal negation by throwing away all the determinate differences

between the contraries of something. So we can construct the idea of a contradictory of a

property, of one that is, Hegel says, its opposite. And we do that just the way, I mean it’s another

path through the same— exploiting the same structure, just the way that the, well just by

reversing the way that the Tarskian order of explanation looked at these things. So the opposite

of a property is the property that’s had by all and only the objects that don’t have that property.

So we can get red, we can get to non-red. Non-red just is the property that’s exhibited by all the

objects that don’t exhibit red.

That’s the opposite of a property. What’s the opposite of an object? We have this symmetrical

relation between objects and properties. The object has a bunch of properties. The property is

true of a bunch of objects. We can define the opposite, the contradictory, of a property in this

way. We have a property that applies to some objects and its opposite is the property that applies

to all and only the other objects, the ones that that property doesn’t apply to. So what would the

contradictory, the opposite of an object be? It would be an object that had all and only the

properties that the first object doesn’t have. But what Aristotle already noticed is: there is no

such thing. Because all the properties that a given object doesn’t have aren’t compatible with one

another. They include things that are contraries of each other as well as things that are contraries

of the objects they have here. So, my right thumb has the property of not being identical with

Mozart. And it also has the property of not being identical with the phone that’s sitting on the

table here. So the object that was the opposite of my thumb would have to be the property of

being identical to Mozart and identical to the phone that’s sitting there, but it can’t have those.

Those are exclusively different properties. Because of the way contraries work, objects can’t

have opposites. Now that’s an inter-categorial asymmetry between objects and properties, which

is a necessary feature of, in part constitutive of, the identity of those ontological categories, that

properties have opposites and objects don’t. That’s another way of thinking about the relation

between contrariety and contradictoriness. Hegel spent years thinking about this difference in

Aristotle and the Dawn of Logic. And what we get is this result. If we start with this distinction

between exclusive and mere difference, we can see that implicit in it is this fine structure of

different kinds of identity and difference, different kinds of constructed negation. We can say

objects and properties are in a certain sense categorially opposites of each other. They differ

from each other in this constitutive way, namely that properties has opposites and objects don’t.

That’s a category defining difference between objects and properties. To be an object, the

identity of thinghood in general, as he says, consists in part, but essentially and necessarily in

being different from properties in that it doesn’t have opposites. That turns out to be necessary

for it to play the role of a unit of account for properties. That isn’t obvious when you just think

about feature-placing.

‘It’s fine’ and ‘it’s night’. ‘It’s raining’ and ‘it’s night’. Those three different properties stand in

the two different kinds of difference to each other. ‘Fine’ and ‘rainy’ are exclusively different,

‘fine’ and ‘night’ indifferently different, ‘raining’ and ‘night’ indifferently different. In that

already is the identity of these two categories, the properties and the units of account for the

properties, whose difference as ontological categories is constituted in part by this exclusive

inter-categorial difference between them, namely that the one has contradictories and the other

doesn’t. It because Aristotle saw that already that I call this structure of objects and properties

Aristotelian. He was the first one to think through what it was about. Well, it’s this structure that

starts with exclusive differences between properties as what the identity of the property consists

in is its difference from its intra-categorial others, its exclusive difference. You can think of it as

being the property it is as its position in the space of contraries. If, in the contemporary literature

on the metaphysics of properties, if you identify properties by the nomological relations they

stand in to other properties this is an instance of that kind of view, because these contrarieties are

modally robust, they’re nomological relations. So that’s the first kind of identity and difference,

just within the category of properties.

But then we see that the difference between the exclusive difference and mere difference requires

an inter-categorial difference—it requires units of account for these things—and that that inter-

categorial difference, that’s equally essential to what it is to be a property. It’s to be in this inter-

categorial relation to things that are not properties, that are exclusively different from properties

in a quite different sense than the sense in which contraries are exclusively different from one

another. And when we think about these units of account and the relations that they stand in to

the properties, we see that they stand in two quite different and opposed exclusive relations to

properties: one of inclusion, the also, and one of exclusion. They’re units for both of those. And

the difference between those relations between objects and properties, the difference between

those is essential to the identity of objects as objects, as the kind of things that they are. And then

we see that it follows from all of this that while properties can have contradictories, objects can’t,

that these categories are asymmetric with respect to negations in yet a different way, that the

identity of these ontological categories depends on this difference between them, depends on, is

articulated, necessarily involves this difference. This is an order of explanation starting from

exclusive difference of properties that gets us the full Aristotelian structure of objects and

properties. It’s the converse, in a certain way, of the Tarskian order of explanation that is the

foundation of modern logic and semantics, that starts with mere differences of objects,

understand properties as different in terms of the mere differences of the objects they apply to,

defines contradictoriness and formal negation by complementation within the domain and then

defines contrariety in terms of implying the contradictory, and then builds in the modal character

of these things once we go up to the KLS superstructure on the Tarskian structure. That’s one

way of thinking about it. Hegel’s got a completely different metaphysical path through these

ontological structures, one that builds the modality in at the base instead of having it come way

at the end when we impose restrictions on what logically possible worlds are metaphysically or

nomologically possible, that we never imposed on the model theoretic things. So this is the

structure, this is I’m claiming the way he wants us to think about objects and properties. This is

the order in which we extract different features of the fine structure of the relations of negation

that are implicit in the idea of universality tout cour. There are all these different, more

complicated kinds of difference that we can build out of that fundamental difference between

two kinds of difference, between indifferent and exclusive difference. Now we’ve got the

categorial difference between objects and properties; we’ve got the difference between the two

kinds of relations between objects and properties, the inclusive and the exclusive one; we’ve got

this difference of contradictories and no contradictories. All of these are kinds of identity through

difference within the same category and across categories. We build all of them out of the basic

ones and, he says, those basic ones I already gave you at the end of sense-certainty. We looking

on could see that you were already committed to making this distinction just in seeing what’s

expressed by feature-placing language as determinate only insofar as you could distinguish these

two kinds of distinction. So this is the conceptual structure he wants us to grasp and it’s the

background for all of the [?] things that he says here trying to find a language to say these.

Student 2: I’m just wondering, on what grounds are we characterizing this as a metaphysical

claim? So why not limit it to the epistemological at this point?

Bob: Well, the “Perception” chapter has got the structure of an introduction in which he reminds

us what we were getting from the previous chapter and sort of tells us where we’re going to end

up. And then the three experiences of consciousness understanding itself as perceiving, that is

understanding itself as applying sense universals which are immediate and as immediate are still

conceived of as independent of their relations to anything else. You can’t have that, but that’s the

conception. We get the three experiences of it and then a concluding thing that sums up and

points us to the next one. The middle, the second of those experiences of perceiving

consciousness, says “Can’t I help myself by going epistemological here?” I mean specifically

what it’s doing is saying “I’m just a simple caveman. I can’t understand this identity consisting

in differences. Maybe the identity is there ontologically and the differences are just epistemic.”

No, turns out that won’t work. “Maybe the differences are there ontologically and I’m unifying

these things epistemically.” No, that isn’t going to work. We’re going to have to say, well

ontologically objects and properties have identity and difference and our thoughts must too, but

if that’s true, if they have the same structure, how is error possible? Oh, don’t know yet, but

we’ll find out going on. So I mean, the question you ask is up in the air. What is this a structure

of? But it’s going to end up being the structure of both of them. And you know he’s going to

need a term for what structure— determinate ways the world can be and determinate thoughts

about it have to share and everything he said here is going to be amphibious between those.

When all the dust has settled in the science of logic, he says, well this is the structure of logic, so

it’s the structure of being and of thought. You know, philosophers need to be very careful when

they’re giving an irritated response to somebody who really is missing the point that they’ve

gotten and we have this sort of horrible history of Plato’s irritated response when someone asked

him, “Where are these forms anyway?” “Oh they’re laid up in heaven.” If you’re silly enough to

ask that question, then you’re silly enough to accept this answer. And suddenly we have Neo-

Platonism and they say, “Ah, yes! But where is this heaven in which these things are laid out?”

Taking literally in the preface to The Science of Logic Hegel sort of asking himself on behalf of

some Wittgensteinian creatness [?] straight man “So what is this structure? What kind of thing is

this anyway?” He says, “Ah, it’s the structure of God’s thought before the creation,” before there

was a distinction between being and thought is the idea. Well, if you find that helpful, then he’s

glad he said it and if not, don’t take it too literally. Atheist that he is, he doesn’t believe in

creation and so on. So yeah, it’s a new kind of, it’s of a sui generis category, which he will call

indifferently logical, philosophical, or speculative structure, and it has these aspects, ontological

and epistemic. But I mean, I think it’s helpful obviously in the way I presented it to lay it

alongside— Well, I mean is the Tarskian order of explanation an ontological— I mean, that’s a

logical and a semantic way of thinking about things, but you better believe people take it

metaphysically seriously, mostly these days under the heading of Humean metaphysics, and

thereon hangs a different tale, but people certainly do think, well, if that’s the structure of what

we can mean, then that must be the structure of the way things are. Or other people will say,

“Oh, no, no, that’s a bad inference. You can’t read your ontology off of our semantics.”

Ok, well, why don’t we take a twenty minute break and come back at five minutes of the hour

and we’ll look at some actual text to see this going <word obscured by people getting up>.

Ok, well, let’s look at some of the passages and see how much sense they make in the light of the

story that I was telling. The introduction is really up through paragraph 116, is the introduction,

so that’s mostly what I’m going to be looking at first, but I’m going to be jumping around in it.

So in 114, he introduces the idea that the identity of the properties depends on their determinate

differences from one another. So he says, “…if the many determinate properties were strictly

indifferent (gleichgültig) to one another, if they were simply and solely self-related...” That’s a

way he’s talking about unity, about identity, about the one as opposed to the many. “...if they

were simply and solely self-related, they would not be determinate; for they are only determinate

insofar as they differentiate themselves from one another…” That’s unterscheiden. “...and relate

themselves to others as their opposites.” Als entgegengesetzte. “Yet; as thus opposed”

(entgegensetzung) “...as thus opposed to one another they cannot be together in the simple unity

of their medium, which is just as essential to them as negation...” So you’ve got the exclusive

differences between them—that’s the first difference that their identity consists in. “Yet; as thus

opposed to one another they cannot be together in the simple unity of their medium...” Their

medium is thinghood in general, the particulars that exhibit them. “...which is just as essential to

them as negation.” They can’t be together in it if they’re opposed. If they’re exclusively

different, that precisely means they can’t be exhibited by the same object. And yet, that kind of

unity, being in an Also, is as essential as their negations from one another are. So we’ve got a

relatively complex structure. “...the differentiation”—that’s unterscheidung, rather than

unterschied that would be different—”...the differentiation of the properties, in so far as it...is

exclusive,” ausschließende “each property negating the others, thus falls outside of this simple

medium...”, the medium being the objects. So he says you’ve got to think of the property as

having these two kinds of relations—its intra-categorial relations of exclusive difference to other

properties and its inter-categorial relation to the simple medium, the one, the thing, and yet it’s

relation to the thing is just such that the thing excludes all those other properties, all the ones that

are contraries of it.

Again in 114, “if the many determinate properties...” Yeah, ok, all right. So then 114 continues,

“The One”—objects—”is the moment of negation; it is itself quite simply a relation of self to

self and it excludes an other; and it is that by which ‘thinghood’ is determined as a Thing.” So

this is just saying that its role as a unit of account for exclusions, for exclusive differences, is

essential to what it is for it to be one thing. Two things can have incompatible properties, but one

thing can’t. So its identity as one thing essentially depends on its excluding some of the

properties that it doesn’t have. Some of them it simply doesn’t have and others it excludes—the

ones that are contraries of ones that it has. Still in 114, “Negation is inherent in a property as a

determinateness which is immediately one with the immediacy of being”—now that’s because

we’re talking about sense universals, so observable properties, ones that we can apply not as a

product of and inference—”an immediacy which, through this unity with negation, is

universality.” Now remember I quoted him saying the richness of content belongs to perception,

not to sense certainty, not to immediate certainty, because only here is the content mixed with

negation. And now we’re finding out mixed with negation is a very crude way of describing the

intricately articulated structure that he’s got. “As a One, however, the determinateness is set free

from this unity with its opposite, and exists in and for itself.” So it is a unity and what we’ve got

to understand is the multifarious ways in which having the identity you do, being the unity that

you are as an object depends on all of these contrasts, some of them exclusive, but even the

exclusive differences have different kinds. The way the object excludes other properties is

different from the way properties exclude other properties. The way the object is exclusively

distinguished from properties in general—properties in general have opposites; it doesn’t—all of

those are different.

Here I thought it was useful to jump ahead a little. In 120, which is in the middle of the second

experience of consciousness conceiving itself as understanding, he says, “...these diverse aspects

for which consciousness accepts responsibility are specifically determined. White is white only

in opposition to black, and so on, and the Thing is a One precisely by being opposed to others.

But it is not as a One that it excludes others from itself...it is through its determinateness”—its

properties— “that the thing excludes others. Things are therefore in and for themselves

indeterminate; they have properties by which they distinguish themselves from one another.” I

think this is a way of saying that objects are merely different from one another—they don’t have

contraries, as well as not have contradictories—but their mere difference from one another,

which is what makes them have the kind of unity that they do, consists in them having the

specifically determined properties that they do, namely in excluding properties that are the

contraries of those properties.

So in 113, before those passages in 114 I was reading, he says the sense universal is a universal

immediacy and I’m saying that just means it’s a sense universal. And 113 continues, “the

medium in which these determinacies permeate each other in that universality as a simple

unity...but without making contact with each other…” This is what later he’ll call the Also, all

these indifferent properties that are properties of one and the same object are in it without

interfering with one another. Its being cubical doesn’t interfere with its being white or its being

tart, because those are all merely different. So he says they permeate each other in that

universality. Now here the universality is the medium of one object and what it’s universal over

is all of the properties, merely indifferent properties, that it’s got. It’s universal relative to those

properties.

Hegel does not, as far as I can see, distinguish here between properties as repeatables and

properties as tropes. I think I mentioned that, for no very good reason, the recent literature has

taken to using the word ‘trope’ for individual property instances, as opposed to properties that

can have many instances. Ok, so when he says that it’s universal, that it’s the universality, the

one object that has these many properties is a universality, a universal medium with respect to

them, one might want to know, well is that a bunch of property tropes? Or is that a bunch of

property repeatables that it’s universal with respect to? And I can’t pin him down as answering

that question one way or another.

Ok, “...for it is precisely through participation in this universality that each is on its own

indifferent to the others.” Each is, on its own, the property that it is. It’s indifferent to the others

—they can be co-exemplified. As it has turned out, “this abstract universal medium, which can

be called ‘thinghood’ itself…is nothing other than” what in the previous section we called “the

here and now…” Ok, part of the background to this is that in spite of the huge differences that

there were between the Early Modern, pre-Kantian philosophers and the medievals—less than

some people think. Former colleague Joe Camp has a very interesting article called “Descartes,

the Last Scholastic”—all of them used basically Aristotelian principles of identity and

individuation. Kant was the first one, because of his study of Newton, to use spatio-temporal

principles to identify and individuate ordinary objects, to think of them as identified and

individuated by their spatio-temporal location. That shift, from thinking about essence and

accident to thinking about spatio-temporal principles of identity and individuation, vastly

important in Kant—that’s why the aesthetic plays the role that it does—and Hegel is here saying,

well look the reason the Here and Now played the role that they did in sense certainty already,

we can now see the successor, sort of more filled-in notion of that is the pure thinghood. And

he’s thinking of the things as being what were individuated by Here and Now, but he says

they’re individuated by their properties. “This abstract universal medium, which can be called

thinghood itself is none other than the here and now, namely, as a simple ensemble of the many.”

It’s a one in which the many are unified.

Ok, a couple of things from 114 that I think are still elaborating this picture I described. He

identifies his topic. He says, as it turned out, “In this relationship, it is merely the character of

positive universality which is at first observed and developed…” So we’re just looking to unpack

the notion of universality. And he says, already in 114, “This simple medium is not merely an

“also”,”—the Also of the many indifferently different properties— “an indifferent unity,” he

says, “it is also a “one”, an excluding unity.” So here are the two aspects of objecthood, as

inclusive relative to merely different properties and exclusive relative to exclusively different

properties. In all of these things, I’ve been talking about the topic as being understanding unity as

consisting in differences of different kinds. And we can already see that’s not just a vague

slogan: identity consists in differences. Yes, he would accept that, but we’re seeing there’s a

much more articulated structure of differences that he thinks the identity of an object or property

consists in. He also will use the term for the kind of identity that consists in its differences—he’ll

talk about it as the negation of the negation. The negation it’s the negation of is the differences

that constitute the unity and it’s the negation of them in that it’s a unity created out of those

differences. I think you don’t get anywhere in thinking about Hegel if you think there’s some one

principle of the negation of the negation or of identity out of difference. Already just in talking

about perceptible objects we see that there are many kinds of negation, many kinds of difference,

and many kinds of identities formed out of them and an intricate, indissoluble structure of all of

those. So just rehearsing these slogans—negation of the negation, identity through difference—

that isn’t going to get you there. You’ve got to look at the fine structure of different kinds of

differences, all of which, he’s claiming, can be elaborated from those two fundamental kinds of

difference—mere difference and exclusive difference.

So in 117 he says, “I now further perceive the property as determinate, as contrasted with another

and as excluding it”. So that was our first point. “I thus in fact did not apprehend the objective

essence”—well, the essence of objects—”correctly when I determined it as a community with

others…” That is, as an Also, as a medium in which indifferent properties can be. And in terms

“of the determinateness of the property, I must in fact break up the continuity into pieces”—the

community into pieces—”and posit the objective essences”—the essence of objects—”as an

excluding One...” So we got the object as an Also and the object as One—again the exclusive

difference between those two roles with respect to properties that are essential to the identity of

particulars or objects as such. And he says, “In the broken up One I find many such properties

which do not affect one another but which are instead indifferent to each other.”

Ok and in 115 he says, “...the Thing as the truth of perception”—he elsewhere calls it the Thing

with many properties—”reaches its culmination to the extent that it is necessary to develop it

here.” So here’s everything that we have extracted as implicit in the notion of universality in the

form of the Thing of many properties and it is the “indifferent passive universality, the Also of

the many properties of rather ‘matters’“—so that’s the Also—the “negation generally as simple;

that is the One, the excluding of contrasting properties—that’s the other side of objects as

exclusive—”and the many properties themselves” identified by their standing in relations both of

exclusive difference to some properties and of indifferent difference to others, which is “the

relation of the first two moments”. So that difference of two kinds of difference of properties is

reflected in the difference between the object as Also and the object as excluding the One, so just

as we can think of the object as the relation between those two roles, we can think of the

properties as the relation between the two kinds of relations of difference that they stand in to

other properties. The “negation as it relates itself to the indifferent element”—that’s the object

—”and extends itself within it is a range of differences;”—that the many properties in the Also

—”the point of…individuality in the medium of enduring existence radiating out into

multiplicity.” And now here I think the “radiating out” means this is its role in excluding, this

penumbra of contrary properties, this cloud of uninstantiated contrary properties that we can

think of as surrounding every instantiated property. Those are all the ones that are repelled by it

and that are not in the object. And there’s the others that are indifferent, that are not repelled by it

because they’re not in this cloud of contraries around it. And what we’re going to find in the next

section, where he’s worried about the supersensible world behind the sensible world, the one

he’s really going to be worrying about is all of those uninstantiated possibilities, the ones that are

excluded, in virtue of which the ones that are instantiated are the things they are—where are

they? They’re not instantiated in the things and yet they’re essential to those properties being

what they are and so to the object being what they are. Ask where they are that’s not right, but

how are we to think of their presence, their activity in this thing.

Ok, so I think every piece of the story that I was telling we see in those passages from 113 to 115

really and those are the ones where he’s not—where he’s just telling us how it is, this is where

we’re going, I’m speaking in the order of exposition of the book to you the phenomenological

consciousness, haven’t yet seen how any of this emerges in the experience of the phenomenal

consciousness, the consciousness that understands itself as perceiving the thing of many

properties. That will get three experiences, three movements of experience, in the sense of

movements of experience, experience of error and so on that we saw in the introduction. So next

I’ll say something about those three movements of experience, but let me stop here. At this point

the hope is that you can understand what he’s saying in this sometimes extravagant language as

talking about this other order of metaphysical explanation of the Aristotelian structure of things

of many properties.

Ok, well, the three experiences go like this. And let me say, I don’t have a really good story

about why it’s just these three, why in this order, how they come out of one another. I think I

understand the picture we’re supposed to get, that we get in those introductory paragraphs and in

the concluding one. Exactly how these experiences give rise to one another is much less clear to

me. So I’m going to give it my best shot, but I don’t think it’s that satisfactory. What I am

confident of is, the first of them involves consciousness conceiving itself, understanding itself,

under the categories of perception, of perceiving consciousness—that is, taking itself to be

applying sense universals, which are immediate, both immediate in the sense of immediacy of

origin, which they really are, and in the sense of immediacy as independence of relation to other

things, as being self-contained or autonomous, and that’s the one that you can’t have. What it’s

going to be experiencing are manifestations of the fact that the identities of everything it

perceives are intelligible only in terms of their relations of multifarious kinds of multifarious

other things, of properties to other properties, of properties to objects, of objects to those

properties of objects to other objects. And the first of those experiences, which is just the long

paragraph 117, is perceiving consciousness being bemused because it seizes on unity and that

dissolves into multiplicity and when it asks, well what is the identity of these multiple items, that

identity dissolves into further multiplicities. Furthermore, these are negations, oppositions. It just

doesn’t understand what’s going on. So that first experience is realizing that there’s an issue,

realizing that universality is fraught with negation, is articulated by negation. It doesn’t know

how, yet, and it doesn’t understand how that can be. But it’s still seeing these as objectively in

the things and the properties.

In the second experience of consciousness, it tries out the strategy of—and I mean, I will go back

and look in more detail at that first one; this is just the overview—it tries out the strategy of

assigning identity and difference to different poles of the intensional axis. So it starts with

objective unity and subjective diversity. The way things are is just the way things are but I see all

these differences in it. And the second one as objective diversity which I unify. Now these

correspond to Kantian and Shelleyan schemes. So the second one—Kant says, unity is

everywhere and always the product of the intellect. What sense delivers is a manifold of intuition

and any unification of it is the result of our activity. Namely, our synthetic activity. Unity is the

product of intellectual activity. That’s what the understanding does: it unifies things. And

because he thinks the mind is best known to itself, he thinks what we’ve done we should be able

to understand and analyze. So we ought to be able to analyze these unities, since they’re our

products. This is Kant now.

I call the other scheme Shelleyan because of this passage in his poem Adonis. He says, “The One

remains, the many change and pass;/ Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;/ Life,

like a dome of many-coloured glass,/ Stains the white radiance of Eternity.” So we’ve got the

white radiance of Eternity, Heaven’s light that shines forever, and life is this dome of multi-

colored glass that breaks it up, stains it with colors, and gives us this multi-colored appearance.

So that’s the opposite of the Kantian picture—the white radiance of Eternity is unified until it

gets to our jumbled, colored pieces of glass that create this other view.

Now whether thinking about this epistemologically or ontologically, this was a battle that was

fought out with the British absolute idealists between Bradley and Russell just before the turn of

the century. Russell, in his characteristic style, says the question is whether the universe is to be

conceived of as a bucket of shot or as a bowl of jelly. If it’s a bucket of shot then you’ve got to

pick up—he’s thinking of shotgun shot, so that’s all these little BBs—you’ve got to pick up

some of them and keep them from rolling out of your hand. You’ve got to keep them together,

but you can pick up different ones. Or if it’s the bowl of jelly you’ve got to carve something out

of it with a spoon, out of the goo, and where those distinctions are made that will be your

contribution. Again, thought of ontologically this was the view that Russell was giving us a

metaphor for. And in contemporary analytic metaphysics you’ve got your goo universe and your

atomistic universe too. This is still going on or going around again on the merry-go-round,

depending on how you think it. Bradley’s way of putting this, which Russell took over, was to

distinguish between internal and external relations. Internal relations are—the paradigm is

relations between the parts of a thing—they’re the relations without which the thing wouldn’t be

the thing that it is. And the external relations are the relations that are not essential to its being

the thing that it is. So paradigmatically, in the example F.H. Bradley uses, the relation between

the rungs and the rails of a ladder are internal relations. If you separate the rungs from the rails,

you don’t have a ladder any more. A ladder is rails related to rungs in a ladder-like way. The

relation between the ladder and the wall that it’s leaning up against—that’s an external relation.

You can have the same ladder leaning up against a different wall. But the relation among its

parts, rungs to rails, that’s internal to it. And in characteristic, late 19th century metaphysical

fashion the two options available were absolute idealism, all relations are internal relations, and

Russellian atomism, all relations are external relations. One of the ways the American

pragmatists sometimes conceived themselves was saying, there, there. There really are some

internal relations and some external relations. You know, don’t go berserk with this. And

Russell’s friend Whitehead coined the name the fallacy of lost contrast with this as a paradigm

instance of that. So look the distinction between internal and external relations in the case of the

ladder makes perfect sense, as a distinction, but now if you say all there is, in principle, in the

universe is internal relations, the distinction with external relations that was necessary to make

the notion of internal relations coherent is gone—fallacy of lost contrast. And by the way, you,

Russell, are in the same position. You can’t say, “Well yes that’s foolish. They’re really all the

relations there are external relations.” Again, fallacy of lost contrast. This was their way of

talking about what earlier generations would have talked about as essential or accidental, but

now in the mode of relations. This is Bradley’s way of being a holist. It’s put in literary form in

Wordsworth’s [Note: this is actually by Tennyson] Flower in the Crannied Wall, when he says,

“Ah, but for me to really understand this part of the universe I would actually have to understand

everything.” It’s relation to a butterfly in China, that’s really internal to this flower in the

crannied wall. That was what Bradley was giving philosophical voice to and Russell, no, the

atomism on the other side, talking about what were essential relations and what were not—

they’re all essential; no, none of them are essential.

Quine in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ says, “Meaning is what essence becomes when it’s

divorced from the thing and attached to the word.” And I think this is a deeply resonant passage.

He’s looking at semantics, theory of meaning, and saying, “You know, we may think this debate

about buckets of shot and bowls of jelly is really old-fashioned and we know better than to worry

about that, but a debate of exactly the same structure is happening in semantics, where the

holists, like me Quine by the way, say all semantic relations are internal relations. The meaning

of something is a matter of its role in the whole web of belief—its relation to everything else, all

those relations are equally essential to it. You can’t make an analytic/synthetic distinction. That

would be the distinction between semantic internal relations and semantic external relations.

That just is the analytic synthetic distinction.” And he’s saying, no they’re all equally analytic,

equally synthetic. They’re all reacting to that, people like Fodor say, “No, there are these, glassy

essences, these atomic units of meaning and what we have to do is put them together in various

ways.” But Quine was indicating that there are parallel issues, either on the side of ontology or

on the side of semantics. “Meaning is what essence becomes when it’s detached sic from the

thing and attached to the word.” The very same sorts of disputes come up.

Hegel is going to claim to leap over this whole structure of debate in both of its forms, but

worrying about the relation between them and this middle experience, second experience of

consciousness understanding itself as perceiving consciousness, is his first shot across the bow,

his first effort to say, “Look, neither the Kantian mind is the source of all unity nor the Shelleyan

life is the dome of many colored glass refracting the white radiance of eternity—neither of those

is going to do justice to the intricate ways in which identity and difference are interdigitated and

articulated, both on the side of determinate facts—the fact that something has properties—and on

the side of the thoughts that express those facts. So I mean it is only the opening salvo in this but

it’s an important thing.

The third—I’ll also come back to talk about that in more detail insofar as I have time, if not it’ll

be in the notes. The third experience is a very interesting one and particularly interesting in the

light of subsequent philosophical developments, a lot have escaped your attention but I often

think of stuff that happened later as casting light on the earlier thing. The third strategy that

perceiving consciousness tries out in order to make sense of identity and difference says really

this talk about different properties, exclusively different properties, is talk about the relations

among objects. To have different properties is to be related to two different objects. We can

understand all of this in terms of mere differences of objects and of relations between objects.

Now this view has a lot in common with what I called the Tarskian order of explanation, but

there’s more to it than that. The diversity that makes an object determinate is thought about as

exclusively consisting in its relation to other objects. And there’s going to be a kernel of the truth

in this. This is the third experience which is going to take us to the “Force and Understanding”

chapter. There’s a holist truth in there that isn’t yet explicit, but what I want to emphasize is this

is a Tractarian conception. Noticeably in the Tractatus there aren’t monadic properties. What

would it be for them to be different? The Tractatus has merely different elementary objects and

merely different relations among those objects. To talk about a property in the Tractatus is to talk

about different relations to objects. You’re always abstracting from some multiadic property and,

of course notoriously, every elementary object can stand in every relation to every other

elementary object. That is, there is no relation of contrariety or exclusive difference among the

properties that are emergent from these relations among objects. Every combination is logically

possible and there is no other sort of modality than the logical in the Tractatus. Now probably not

coincidentally, it seems to have been when he was working on his lectures on color that

Wittgenstein decisively moved away from his Tractarian conception. If colors weren’t

elementary features, what were? And yet it seemed to be an essential feature of them that they

stood in these contrariety relations that the Tractatus had no room for. And it was in starting to

think about those that he moved into the Blue and Brown Book middle period.

Anyway, the claim I want to make is that this third experience of consciousness, the strategy that

dissolves there is a recognizably Tractarian strategy that’s going to use relations among objects

to stand in for the properties as a way—the hope is—of reconciling the identity of objects as

standing in—well, as being determinate, but instead of thinking that as having many properties,

it’s thinking of it as standing in relations to many objects. That’s the strategy.

Ok. Well, we’ve got time to look at least at the first one of these and maybe more. So, this is all

in paragraph 117, but I think there’s three moves and we have to sort of decide what’s up with it

by looking at those three moves. So the first one is, “The object which I apprehend presents itself

purely as a One…” So we start with experience of the unity, the identity—we’ve got the One

there. “…but I also perceive in it a property which is universal, and which thereby transcends the

singularity of the object.” It’s a universal. It can apply to more than one thing. So maybe that

does tell against it being a trope that we’ve got. “On account of the universality of the property, I

must rather take the objective essence to be on the whole a community.” Now this is actually not

the way I would have used his language, given what he says in 114/115. I would have thought

that what made me see the object as a community was seeing that it had more than one property,

that it had merely different properties in it. But maybe he’s saying here that’s a consequence of

identifying this property. Its being at least merely different from the others makes me see the

One as a community. If not, what he’s saying by seeing the One as a community is it’s being

grouped into a community by the universal. We’ve got this repeatable property that characterizes

it and that’s creating a relation between this object and all the other objects that share that

property. That’s, I would say, not to see it as a community, but as a member of a community. So

I mean that reading follows better from seeing it as just one universal, one property, but then it’s

a little awkward. He should say he sees it as a member of a community there. So ok, but that’s

the first move.

The second move— “I now further perceive the property to be determinate, opposed to another

and excluding it.” So he’s started, the object that I see there’s this universal thing in it, that was

what I learned from sense certainty. Now I see that it’s determinate and what that means is

excluding others. But now that’s going to mean, that’s going to show that it was incorrect to

think of the property as just unifying its instances, putting them into a community. That’s an

inclusion, seeing the property as including. Now I’m seeing it as excluding as well and how am I

to understand the relation between those two things?

And then the third move, “In the broken up One I find many such properties which do not affect

one another but are mutually indifferent.” So, all right, this I think is saying—it’s only now that

he’s got the multiplicity of properties, so the universal was seeing the object as falling into a

group, into a community of other like-propertied things. So at the previous stage it was noticed

that each property instantiated by a particular object excludes the instantiation by that object of

many others, and now it’s noticed that the object also includes many such excluding properties.

So to continue the passage, so now it, the object, is a universal common medium. So we’ve gone

from thinking of the universal as creating a community to thinking of the object as “a universal

common medium in which many properties are present as sensuous universalities”—observable

properties—”each existing on its own account and, as determinate, excluding the others.” But

now, how can it both be existing on its own account, be just the property that it is, and be

determinate only in virtue of excluding the others? Well, since it’s true of properties that, quote:

“Only when it belongs to a One is it a property, and only in relation to others is it determinate.”

That’s the conclusion of its experience here. Those are two essential features of properties that it

can’t see how to get together. It has to be related to an object, but it has to be related to these

properties in an exclusive way as well.

So, I mean, I’m inclined to see that as merely setting the problem. It’s noticing these features

which in 113 through 115 he’s told us how to think about, how he wants us to think about them,

and here we just see, well, the phenomenal consciousness over whose shoulder we’re looking

can’t do that. So let’s look a little more closely at the second strategy, the second experience,

which is 118 to 120. Well, I’ve said a lot about this, so let me just read some of it. In 118, “for

consciousness it has thereby been determined just how its perceiving is essentially composed,

namely,…not as a simple pure act of apprehending”—it was still supposed to be immediate

universality—”but rather as being in itself an act of apprehending at the same time taking a

reflective turn into itself from out of the True.”—Because it’s finding these opposed aspects in

what it’s doing. It’s not just taking it in anymore.—”This return of consciousness into itself

which immediately blends itself into that pure apprehending”—he’s saying, well what I’m

immediately apprehending is the thing of many properties, but again how can that be? The pure

apprehending and these other…—”has been shown…to be essential to the act of perceiving”—

well, sorry, I’m... “This return of consciousness into itself which immediate blends itself into that

pure apprehending, for…it’s been shown…to be essential to the act of perceiving”—that

reflective return into itself alters the true. Well, remember the emergence of the second new true

object at the end of the introduction. The new true object, the alteration that occurs, is what I

took to be the way things were in themselves, now shows up merely as the way they were for

me, for consciousness. And he’s now realized, oh, there’s more to this apparently simple

apprehending than just that. I’m doing something. I’m distinguishing the thing from the

properties, the properties from the properties, and beginning to see this intricate structure. So he

says, “The conduct of consciousness which is now up for examination is so composed that it is

no longer merely the act of perceiving, but it’s conscious of its reflective turn into itself, and it

separates this reflective turn into itself from simple apprehension itself.” So this is the point at

which the idea becomes available to it that maybe part of what it’s perceiving is the result of its

activity. Now since the problem was getting unity and diversity, the one and the many, together,

content and negation, now it thinks, well, maybe I’m responsible for one of those and the other

one is out there. So that’s where these two ideas come from. And you can do 119 and 120 which

deal respectively with the Shelleyan and the Kantian scheme. Roughly the idea is just what we

saw at the beginning of the introduction. Either of those make its perception that’s supposed to

be immediate apprehension a falsification. If it’s adding unity or if it’s adding multiplicity, either

it’s synthetic activity or the dome of many colored glass refracting it—either of those things is

falsification. So he devotes most of the space—120 to 127 anyway—to this third alternative.

That’s the one that’s going to give rise to next week’s account. Here’s some passages from that.

So in 123, “the Also, that is the indifferent distinction,…falls just as much into the Thing as it

does into oneness”—So we’ve got these two aspects, the particular as the Also that unifies the

merely different properties and as the excluding One that excludes all the properties that are in

the cloud around each of the instantiated properties.—”...falls just as much into the Thing as it

does into Oneness, but since both are different it does not fall into the same Thing but rather into

different Things.”—That’s the idea now is we’re going to look at these two aspects of the

Oneness of the thing as involving relations to different objects.—”The contradiction which exists

per se in the objective essence”—I mean, objective essence, this is the third time this has come

up. That’s a literal translation of the German, but the essence of the object or the essence of what

it is to be an object would be better—”is distributed into two objects.”—So instead of its being in

that object and the subject we’re now distributing into two objects.

So in 124, “the various Things are therefore posited as each existing on its own...”—So each one

is what it is and not some other thing. They’re at least merely different, these objects.—”...and

the conflict falls into each of them reciprocally such that each is different, not from itself, but

only from the others.” The trouble with conceiving the identity of the object as consisting in its

differences, in the difference of it from its properties and in the two different relations it stands in

to properties, one inclusive and one exclusive, it seems like a difference from itself. That’s not

the form of an identity. “...each is different, not from itself, but only from others.” So Tractarian

conception—we’ve got these merely different objects and any difference that we find in one

object is going to be a matter of relations to different objects. “However, each is thereby itself

determined as something distinct and has the essential distinction from others in it.” If they’re

numerically distinct, as is sometimes that they’re merely different, still there has to be some

content to that difference. But at the same time not in such a way that this would be a contrast in

itself. “Rather it is on its own simple determinateness which constitutes its essential characters,

and distinguishes it from others.” Now in contemporary metaphysics, this would be called

haecceity. Haecceity, I guess that’s Duns Scotus originally, is the this-ness of something. It’s the

property of individuality, of being this thing and not some other thing. That’s an interesting kind

of property to conceive, but you know it’s not a property like being red—that’s clear—but that’s

what’s being tried out here. Well, there is some differences, some this-ness, some particularity

that this thing has and a different one that this thing has that doesn’t dissolve into have different

properties. So the less plausible side of Leibniz’s Law is the identity of indiscernibles, saying

that if two things have the same properties then they’re really one thing. The more plausible side

is the indiscernibility of identicals—if two things are identical then they have the same

properties. Haecceities are a way of denying the identity of indiscernibles. And remember, it was

very important to Kant to see space and time as not properties but as able to distinguish

indiscernibles—his two hands, sitting in space, different, his right hand and left hand, but no

different properties that they had. There’s a huge discussion of this example, but this view—

well, there could be merely different things, even if they shared all the same properties.

Haeccetism is the view that that’s intelligible. I think that’s reading model theory into ontology,

but ok. Yeah, so he considers that.

But he finds in 127 that this is not a coherent conception of determinateness. So he’s going to

have the phenomenal perceiving consciousness reject this notion of haecceitism as unintelligible.

And we hear for that reason in 128 that the object is the opposite (Gegenteil) of itself. Now that’s

the very term that we use when we talk about properties having opposites, having

contradictories, and of course Hegel reminded us in the earlier part that objects don’t have

opposites. So we’ve gotten into a bad place. So in 129, “from out of sensuous being it became a

universal; but…since it emerged from the sensuous, this universal is essentially conditioned by

the sensuous, and thus is not truly in parity with itself.”—Well, it’s not truly identical, self-

identical—”Rather it is a universality affected with an opposition, which for that reason is

separated into the extreme terms of individuality and universality.” So we see that the very

notion of a universal, even if it’s a sense universal, implicitly involves the categorial distinction

between particulars and universals. That is to say, the passage goes on, “of the One of…

properties and the Also of the free-standing matters.”—the One of the properties that are

excluded and the Also of the free-standing matters—”These pure determinatenesses seem to

express essentiality…itself”—what it is to be an object—”however, they are only a ‘being-for-

self’ which is burdened with…’being-for-another’.”—Now here, the being for self, that’s not a

being for consciousness, but that’s a unity that is burdened by consisting in its relations to some

other things.—”But since…both exist in one unity,…unconditioned absolute universality itself is

now on hand, and for the first time consciousness truly enters into the realm of the

Understanding.” That is, realizing that these things must go together, even though it doesn’t

understand it, it’s now set itself in the level of understanding.

So in a summary in 130, “the sophistry of perceiving seeks to save these moments”—identity

and difference—”from their contradiction,…to hold fast to them by distinguishing various points

of view, by invoking the ‘Also’ and…’insofar’, as well seeking finally to lay hold of what is true

by distinguishing the unessential from an essential that is opposed to the universal. Yet all of

these expedients”—the three experiences—”instead of warding off illusion and apprehension,

prove themselves…to be rather nothing at all; and the true which is supposed to be won through

this logic of perceiving proves to be in one and the same regard the opposite and thereby to have

as its essence that universality completely devoid of distinction and determination.” So none of

those strategies is going to get you determinate universals.

So ok, well, I hope you’re in a position now—this is again, what?, 111-130, we’re talking about

twenty paragraphs. This is a manageable stretch of text. There’s really a lot going on in this and I

keep making reference to contemporary analytic metaphysics. That’s a house with many

mansions. There is nobody running the Hegelian line that he’s running here. Nobody’s trying

that out in contemporary metaphysics. Somebody surely ought to be addressing their problems in

these terms, but when you say Hegelian metaphysics people don’t think of this particular

constellation of ideas.

So “Force and Understanding” next time. Here’s the key thought to keep in mind when you read

it: force is the paradigmatic Newtonian, theoretical concept and Hegel uses force to mean

theoretical objects. Force is just the paradigmatic one, but it’s the whole class of things that are

not observable, properties that are theoretically postulated.

I will post some more detailed discussion. There is some more detailed discussion that I didn’t

get into in the notes and I will post that on the website.