Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T19:03:47.706Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On Origins and Species: Hegel on the Genus-Process

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2020

Daniel Lindquist
Daniel Lindquist*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington, [email protected]
Get access

Abstract

There is a broad consensus in the literature that in the section on ‘The Genus’ in the Science of Logic, Hegel argues that any living being must exist among other instances of its kind, with which it reproduces to create future generations, and out of which it was itself produced. This view is not only hard to motivate philosophically, it also seems to contradict many things Hegel says elsewhere in his system about the details of living nature, especially concerning the reality of spontaneous generation. After an examination of the secondary literature on ‘The Genus’, I offer an alternative view of this section, which I call ‘the Modal Reading’. The Modal Reading sees the language of pluralities in ‘The Genus’ as really Hegel's peculiar way of articulating certain modal features of thoughts about the living: to grasp a living individual as living, we need to distinguish not only between this individual and its environment, but also between the things this individual actually does and other possibilities which it does not actualize. The Modal Reading has a logical motivation insofar as it articulates what is needed to think of a living being as living, but it also avoids saddling Hegel with the problematic entailments he is usually read as taking on in this section. A further upshot of the Modal Reading is that approaching Hegel in this way provides us with a way to see Hegel as defending a non-nominalistic alternative to essentialist accounts of living kinds. Finding a way to read ‘The Genus’ which coheres with Hegel's views elsewhere in his system thus shows Hegel to have been an especially subtle and penetrating thinker, with continuing relevance for the philosophy of biology.

Type
Articles
Information
Hegel Bulletin , Volume 41 , Special Issue 3: Hegel and the Philosophy of Biology , December 2020 , pp. 426 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Buffon, C. de (1829), ‘De la manière d’étudier et de traiter l'histoire naturelle’. Available at: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/De_la_mani%C3%A8re_d%E2%80%99%C3%A9tudier_et_de_traiter_l%E2%80%99histoire_naturelle. (Last accessed 10/01/19).Google Scholar
Burbidge, J. W. (2007), Hegel's Systematic Contingency. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, D. G. (2007), A Commentary on Hegel's Logic. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cleland, C. (2013), ‘Conceptual Challenges for Contemporary Theories of the Origin(s) of Life’, Current Organic Chemistry 17: 1704–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, D. (1987), ‘Knowing One's Mind’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 60: 441–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, D. (2001), ‘Indeterminism and Antirealism’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Englert, A. T. (2017), ‘Life, Logic, and the Pursuit of Purity’, Hegel-Studien 50: 63–95.Google Scholar
Findlay, J. N. (1984), ‘The Hegelian Treatment of Biology and Life’, in Cohen, R. S. and Wartofsky, M. W. (eds.), Hegel and the Sciences. Dordrecht: Reidel.Google Scholar
Houlgate, S. (2005), An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth, and History. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Knappik, F. (2016), ‘Hegel's Essentialism. Natural Kinds and the Metaphysics of Explanation in Hegel's Theory of “the Concept”’, European Journal of Philosophy 24: 760–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kreines, J. (2008), ‘The Logic of Life’, in Beiser, F. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth Century Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kreines, J. (2015), Reason in the World: The Philosophical Appeal of Hegel's Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuhn, T. (2000), The Road Since Structure. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Libby, E., et al. (2016), ‘A Quantitative Definition of Organismality and its Application to Lichen’. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00036. (Last accessed 10/01/19).Google Scholar
Lindquist, D. (2018), ‘Hegel's “Idea of Life” and Internal Purposiveness’, HOPOS 8:2: 376.Google Scholar
Maybee, J. (2009), Picturing Hegel: An Illustrated Guide to Hegel's Encyclopaedia Logic. Washington: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Mayr, E. (1982), The Growth of Biological Thought. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press.Google Scholar
McDowell, J. (2009), Having the World in View. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Neander, K. (2012), ‘Teleological Theories of Mental Content’. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-teleological/. (Last accessed 10/01/19).Google Scholar
Quine, W. V. O. (1953), ‘On What There Is’, in From A Logical Point of View. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rosen, S. (2013), The Idea of Hegel's ‘Science of Logic’. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schelling, F. W. J. (2004), First Outline of the System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Peterson, K. R.. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Stern, R. (2002), Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. (1977), Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, M. (2008), Life and Action. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wallace, R. (2011), Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wolf, C. (2018), ‘Rethinking Hegel's Conceptual Realism’, The Review of Metaphysics 72:2: 331–70.Google Scholar