Philosophers may disagree with unmatched zeal, but no philosophical controversy can free them from their common dependence upon the concept as a privileged vehicle of truth. Philosophers’ perennial use of conceptual argument might seem a double curse, subverting all of philosophy’s equally perennial aspirations to seize the truth. If philosophy is to go beyond blindly collecting given meanings and instead attain new knowledge through concepts, conceptual determination cannot be limited to abstract universals. All the dilemmas plaguing formal universality and the philosophies that rely upon it are supplanted by a simple insight: the universal cannot possess its encompassing unity as a one over many unless the plurality of its particulars can be sustained. Individuality, as the differentiated particular, is ingredient in universality. The tripartite division into successive logics of being, of essence and of the concept can readily be seen to comprise the self-constitution of self-determination.