ABSTRACT
Kant's model of the object as the product of synthesis, which comes into being through the combination of a plurality of atomistic intuitions, was destined to be rejected by Hegel and other philosophers of his generation, along with the atomistic presuppositions on which it was based. In Hegel's case, the transformation in philosophical outlook that this rejection implied was as profound as it was thoroughgoing: it involved throwing over the empiricist assumption that things are mere congeries of properties, simple ideas or intuitions, and replacing it with an holistic model of individual objects as exemplifying an irreducible substance-universal. Hegel therefore argues, along Aristotelian lines, that in virtue of exemplifying a universal substance-kind (such as ‘man’, ‘cat’, or ‘rose’), the individual should be treated as an ontologically primary single substance, and not as a combination of more fundamental accidental attributes or sensible properties, as the ‘bundle’ model adopted by Kant and the empiricists implied. It is this conception of the object, as having an immanent, irreducible unity, that distinguishes Hegel's account from that of Kant, and leads him to reject the latter's picture of the realization of the object.
