Document Type : Original Article
Author
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran
Abstract
Perception is the second stage of the developmental process of consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which consists of logical necessity and universality. It clears the ground for the possibility of the emergence of things as “essence” for the first time in this process. The conflict between the unity of the thing and plurality of its properties is, however, a fundamental problem that thinkers in the first phase of the history of philosophy (namely, the Aristotelian’s intellectual tradition) tried to solve by making the distinction between essential and non-essential aspects of the thing and ascribing the latter to it multitudinous properties. Nevertheless, when the subject’s role in achieving knowledge came to the front in Modern Philosophy, this solution of Naïve Realism was being challenged, and rethinking it was quite required. As a consequence, this rethinking at first resulted in turning this conflict into an insoluble controversy between Rationalism and Empiricism in ascribing the essential aspect (unity) to the thing (or the object) and the non-essential one (plurality) to the subject by the former and its vice-versa by the latter; the controversy which Kant’s Copernican Revolution proceeded to be its final terminator through invalidating the traditional distinction between essential and non-essential and re-defining the notion of “essence” under the subject’s transcendental conditions for knowledge; However once again his solution was put into the challenge by Hegel’s phenomenology.
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