Contemporary theory yearns for concreteness. Across the board of the theoretical humanities, we find methodological aspirations marked by a strong commitment to concretising theoretical concepts and evading the abstract realm of detached and universal thought. However, current attempts at reaching the concrete by means of privileging singularity and immediacy or by reference to concrete objects often end up prey to abstract thought themselves. Taking seriously the desire for concreteness, this thesis intervenes in the metaphilosophical discussion of theory development by advancing a methodological examination of concrete concepts drawing on Hegel’s account of concreteness as a mode of thinking rather than a quality pertaining to external things. The thesis argues that because concrete thinking is at its core a question of logical form, concept formation in the critical humanities should be approached through a dialectical method of problem articulation.

On the level of intellectual history, this line of reasoning is accomplished by identifying a particularly fruitful philosophical moment of post-Hegelian French thought centred around four texts by Jean Hyppolite, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Martin and Gaston Bachelard. The juxtaposition of these texts, that are all written in the five-year span 1947-1952, indicates a dimension of the “turn to the concrete” of French 20th century philosophy that cannot be reduced to phenomenological and existential concerns, but is notable for its methodological attention to the constitution of transdisciplinary concepts. On a systematic level, the thesis examines the potential of this intersection between the speculative ideal of logical concreteness and the materialist philosophy of science of problem articulation as an alternative to pure philosophical questioning, thus countering the usual opposition of dialectics and the French epistemologist trajectory of the problematic.

The first part situates the thesis in the present theoretical landscape and launches its strategy of reconstructing a methodological account of concrete thinking through triangulating the categories of problem, exemplarity and mediation. Against this backdrop, the second part explores the role of abstraction and conceptual concretisation in Hegel’s dialectical-speculative logic together with his account of the history of philosophy as the temporal counterpart of logic. It defines the concrete concept as characterised by expressing a conflict of determination effectively structuring a systematic whole and determining itself through its exemplary relations to a retroactively constituted philosophical past.

Reinserting Beauvoir anew in the French Hegel renaissance, the third part takes her analysis of “woman” as a paradigmatic case of concrete concept formation. It brings forth an otherwise neglected method of concretisation at work in her determination of femininity, whose conflictual mediation through experiential examples appropriates but also moves beyond Hegel’s philosophy. Arguing that this determination culminates in the contradiction of sex as expressed in the figure of The Little Mermaid, this problem interpretation sheds light on a profoundly critical legacy of feminist theory presenting a counterpoint to affirmative politics of equality.

In order to propose this constructive yet negation-driven articulation of problems as a compelling “methodological translation” of the philosophical notion of concrete conceptuality, the fourth part expounds on the practical operativity of problems. First in Martin’s historically informed philosophical sense of problem posing as a retroactive reading strategy enabling new intellectual objects to appear, and second in Bachelard’s “applied rationalism” according to which scientific concepts are temporarily, technically and socially mediated. Then, following from Hyppolite’s non-anthropological reading of Hegel’s “philosophy of mediation”, the thesis finally construes a dialectical-speculative form of problem articulation, which is productive despite its critical gesture precisely insofar as it sets up a collective scientific project to be subjected to. Decentring creative knowledge production as the goal of concrete theory development in favour of a critical reorganisation of actually existing categories, this reconstruction of the logic of problems contributes to making more effective theoretical interventions in our time.