Towards Exemplarity

I start from the definition of the exemplary case offered by Angela Condello and Maurizio Ferraris – an exemplary case is a “concrete abstraction” – and argue that exemplarity is a process, an attribute of the phenomena depending on the action, and a realistic practice. I refer to the analysis of Walter Benjamin and Gy€orgy Lukacs on realistic and modernist literature to consider that, in order to be exemplary, a case has to be particular and that we discover exemplarity when we focus on the details of the case. I call the particularity of an exemplary case its “thick features” and claim that these features cannot be absorbed by an abstract model. Exemplary cases cannot be described and understood by their thin features – as if they were facts belonging to a species – but they need to be appreciated through their thick features. Furthermore, I claim that exemplarity exists only within a community and because of an appreciation and that the gesture of appreciation is not an “innocent” practice. I analyze the gesture of appreciation and claim that exemplarity does not belong to the Platonic kind of knowledge, but it entails the same ontological premises of mimesis. We appreciate a case because we are in a mimetic relation with it. We do not learn the general model the case refers to by a concept, but we learn it by reference to a concrete situation. We see the general model in a concrete situation. I argue that there is a strong link between the appreciation of a case and the special normativity of exemplarity. The special link between the concrete and the abstract characterizes the normativity of exemplarity so radically that exemplarity appears always, in a certain way, as “counter-normative.” It expresses a principle not yet expressed, without a formal recognition, a voice without language

Abstraction · Action (physics · Aesthetics · Epistemology · Focus (optics · Gesture · Linguistics · Order (exchange · Relation (database · Sociology · Computer Science · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Philosophy

• The Logic of Exemplarity

  Jakub Mácha•Law & Literature•2020

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• Exemplarity as deliberative curriculum

  Jacob Egholm Feldt•Studies in Higher Education•2023

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• Hitler, for Example

  Open Access•Nitzan Shoshan•Comparative Studies in Society…•2022

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