ABSTRACT universal User Manual download pdf (Page 39)

is, if anything, clearer still. Take away from the various ﬁgures what makes

them ﬁgures and nothing remains. It may be said that lines might still exist,

even if they did not enter into ﬁgures. But such lines would not be these lines,

for these are the sides of a ﬁgure, and if ﬁgure went, they too would go. Thus,

just as ﬁgure has being only in its diﬀerentiations, so these have being only as

diﬀerentiations of it.

We have foun d, then, that there is a constant thread running through the

thought of the Anglo-American idealists, and the origins of that thread can

be traced back to Hegel.

100

Thus, while not everything these Idealists say

about the concrete universal makes sense in Hegelian terms (at least, given

my reading of Hegel), a central part of their conception does. Moreover, we

have seen that the issues behind that conception are not in fact alien to us,

but relate directly to debates concerning the content of experience, and the

metaphysical implications of the claim that this content is conceptual all the

way down: the doctrine of the concrete universal, therefore, perhaps

deserves to be seen as a live option in that debate, and not the peculiar piece

of exotica it is so often presented as being.

101

University of Sheﬃeld

Ibid., 584.

100

I would not want to claim that the inﬂuence of Hegel here is always direct: it is doubtless

often mediated by other ﬁgures who helped to shape Anglo-American Idealism, such as Lotze

and Sigwart, for whom the Hegelian conception also played an important role; but that story

cannot be explored here.

101

I have presented versions of this paper at the 2004 conference of the Hegel Society of Great

Britain; at departmental seminars at Sheﬃeld and York; and at the History of Political Thought

Seminar at Cambridge; I am grateful to those who made helpful comments on these occasions. I

am also grateful to Fraser MacBride and Peter Nicholson, and to an anonymous referee for this

journal, for a number of suggestions that led to improvements to the text. I would also like to

acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanties Research Council, for funding the research

leave during which this paper was largely written.

HEGEL AND THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL 153

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ABSTRACT universal User Manual Page 39