Four Types of Conceptual Generality, by Christian Martin
This paper deals with different ways in which a general concept might relate to more specific ones. A “classical approach” to this question, according to which a more specific concept can be analyzed into genus and specific difference, accounts for only one kind of generality. Christian Martin discusses various non-classical types of conceptual generality to be found in Aristotle, Hegel, Johnson and Wittgenstein. While these types are usually dealt with separately, the paper locates them within a fourfold classification of kinds of conceptual generality: accidental, essential, serial and comprehensive generality. It is argued that the concept of generality itself is serial in character. In consequence, getting a firm grasp of conceptual generality demands a principled account of the series of its kinds, which the paper aims to develop.
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Christian Martin is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Among his recent publications are a book on Hegel’s Science of Logic entitled Ontologie der Selbstbestimmung: Eine operationale Rekonstruktion von Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik (Mohr/Siebeck, 2012), and several book chapters, including “Semantische Bestimmtheit,” in Das Zusammenspiel von Spekulation und Vorstellung in Hegels enzyklopädischem System, ed. Kazimir Drilo and Axel Hutter (Mohr/Siebeck, 2015), and “Die Idee als Einheit von Begriff und Objektivität,” in Hegel: 200 Jahre Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Claudia Wirsing, Anton F. Koch, and Friedrike Schick (Meiner, 2014). His article “Hegel on Judgments and Posits” is forthcoming in Hegel-Bulletin.
Christian Martin, “Four Types of Conceptual Generality,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 36:2 (2015), pp. 397–423.