•  14
    Six Hegelian Theses about Technology
    Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 24 (3): 376-404. 2020.
    Hegel has long been considered a major thinker of progress. This paper extends Hegel’s philosophy of progress into an outline of a philosophy of technology. It does this not by directly reading the little Hegel wrote on the subject, but by introducing six central Hegelian ideas that bear on the technological thought. It argues that, for Hegel, (1) mankind is destined to change its destiny; (2) that true change involved qualitative change; (3) that true change is conceptual, and not material, cha…Read more
  •  18
    A Self-Forming Vessel: Aristotle, Plasticity, and the Developing Nature of the Intellect
    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 51 (3): 259-274. 2020.
    Highlighting the relations between De Anima II.5 and De Anima III.4, this paper argues that Aristotle held a surprisingly dynamic view of the intellect. According to this view, the intellect is in...
  •  5
    The Individual as System
    Idealistic Studies 49 (3): 215-234. 2019.
    In British Hegelianism we find, forgotten, a weighty theory of individuality. This theory remains one of the most sustained attempts in the history of philosophy to analyze the individual, not in the social or psychological sense, but as a logical-metaphysical category. The Idealist conceptualization of the individual is bound with their unconventional theory of universals, for they argued that any individual is a “concrete universal,” and vice versa. This article reconstructs the British Ideali…Read more
  •  8
    “The forms of thought are first set out and stored in human language,” we read in the preface to the second edition of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Man thinks through language, and everything he “transforms into language and expresses in it contains a category, whether concealed, mixed, or well defined”. Language, then, harbors thought categories. There is a philosophy of language, but there is also a philosophy implied in language. How is this supposed to work? More specifically, how is this suppo…Read more
  •  35
    Hegel, Spinoza, and the ‘Principle of Individuality’
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26 (4): 499-522. 2018.
    ABSTRACTThis paper attempts to shed light on Hegel’s recurring comment that Spinoza’s philosophy lacks the ‘principle of individuality’. It shows that this criticism can have three distinct meanings: that Spinozism cannot account for the multiplicity of finite individuals; that Spinozism leads to a moral devaluation of the finite individual; the form of substance is indifferent and lacks a differentiating principle. It is shown that Hegel argued, somewhat incoherently, for all three.