We are glad to announce the workshop Hegel’s Concept of Singularity. The event will take place at Cankarjev dom (conference halls: M3/M4) on 6–8 November 2025.
The event is jointly organized by the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, the Department of Philosophy (the research group The Common Between Substance and Subject), Cankarjev dom, and the Goethe-Institut Ljubljana.
Below is a brief presentation of the conference, followed by the list of speakers and the schedule.
Singularity (Einzelheit) is one of the key logical categories of Hegel's philosophy, yet it receives surprisingly little attention in the literature. According to several influential interpretations (e.g., Russell's or Adorno's), Hegel's philosophy explicitly prioritizes the universal over the singular – in the sense that something singular gains actuality only as an instance of a concept (i.e., something universal). According to these interpretations, Hegel's philosophy is distinctly a philosophy of the devaluation of the singular as singular. However, a closer reading reveals that Hegel's conception of singularity is significantly more nuanced. Nevertheless, considerable ambiguity remains in the complex relationship between singularity and universality in Hegel's thought. Hegel himself distinguishes two meanings of "singularity": the traditional philosophical meaning, where singularity is the way in which sensible things exist – immediately and factually; and the second, more complex and specifically Hegelian meaning, where singularity is one of the (three) moments in the articulated structure of the concept. However, it is not entirely clear what the relationship between these two meanings is, and consequently, which meaning Hegel refers to in individual cases. Clarifying these ambiguities is the main purpose of the conference. Although this topic touches upon the deep logical core of Hegel's philosophy, it also has clear implications for the field of political philosophy, as it directly concerns the status of the individual – the central political category of modernity – in his relationship to universality. Perhaps in Hegel, we can hope to find logical tools for thinking an alternative to the social ontology of radical individualism, which at the same time does not lose the individual.
Speakers:
Berker Basmaci (Ankara-Bilkent)
Michela Bordignon (São Paulo-UFABC )
Luca Corti (Padova)
Georgios Faraklas (Athens-Panteion)
Elena Ficara (Paderborn)
Guido Frilli (Florence)
León Antonio Heim (Potsdam)
Martin Hergouth (Ljubljana)
Lucian Ionel (Leipzig)
Bojana Jovićević (Ljubljana)
Zdravko Kobe (Ljubljana)
Karen Koch (Basel)
Attay Kremer (Tel Aviv/Yale)
Jelscha Schmid (Heidelberg/Potsdam)
Joris Spigt (Leipzig)
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