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Abstract
In this dissertation, I offer a new interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of organic life and show its relevance in light of contemporary approaches to the same topic. I argue that the notion of animal reproduction — i.e., reproduction from two parents — is essential to the idea of life, although not all living things reproduce in this way. Only in the case of living things that reproduce in this way do we have a determinate view of the organic unity of a living substance. Other forms of life — for example, plants that reproduce incidentally, and viruses that do not reproduce within their own kind — are intelligible only derivatively, from the primary occurrence of the idea of life in the animal. In other words, I argue that the idea of life differentiates into primary, paradigmatic, and complete occurrences, and secondary, privative, and incomplete occurrences. My dissertation comprises both a systematic and a historical-exegetical aspect. On the systematic side, I put Hegel’s view into conversation with more contemporary analytic approaches to the topic of life. I discuss two important examples of such contemporary approaches, namely the Natural Kind Sortalist approach developed by David Wiggins and the Formal-Inferentialist approach developed by Michael Thompson. These two views represent two possible ways of explicating the concept of life that exhaust the logical space within a certain framework. In that framework, a concept can be either a material concept or a formal concept in judgment. The meaning of a concept would be explicable through reflection on its use in judgments. Each approach faces internal problems that point toward the advantages of the Hegelian framework. I explain the Hegelian framework by proposing a new understanding of the influence of Kant’s critical philosophy on Hegel. On my reading, Hegel explicates life dialectically as an idea of reason. This means that Hegel’s Science of Logic must be understood as a contribution to the same part of philosophy as Kant’s transcendental dialectic. However, Hegel proposes a different mode of dialectics, according to which ideas genuinely capture the being of things as they are in themselves. This mode of dialectical explication involves relating forms of judgment to ideas of reason, which are themselves divided into privative and paradigmatic exemplifications.