Concepts with Teeth and Claws. On Species, Essences and Purposes in Hegel’s Organic Physics

In this chapter I argue that Hegel is not an ‘essentialist’ when it comes to living nature. Hegel does not have a conception of species that fits essentialism, in the sense that this term has for historians of systematics and philosophers of biology: for him, there are no species that constitute the essence of living beings and the purpose of living beings is not to perpetuate the species which they are instantiations of.