Thinking Problems Concretely: Hegelian logic, French philosophy and contemporary theory

About this event Contemporary theory in the humanities and social sciences yearns for the concrete, yet repeatedly falls into the traps of abstract thinking, either by fixating on lived experience, fetishising the singular, or abandoning conceptual and universalising thought altogether. If we turn to a particular moment in European philosophy, however, we find conceptual resources for understanding concreteness as a question of how we think rather than what we think about. This workshop brings together Henry Somers-Hall (London), Ian James (Cambridge) and Anna Cornelia Ploug (Copenhagen) for a discussion of the methodology of ‘concrete thinking’, with particular attention to the French tradition of approaching theory through problems rather than abstract, disciplinary questions. The discus