"Thinking is a Thing: Hegel's use of Examples"

What is the act of giving an example? What kind of thinking is done when a concept is exemplified? What if examples not only deliver less, but also sometimes more, than what their concepts promised? What if there in this way is a certain materiality of the example, a certain “excess of stuff” connected to the example, even a retroactive force, so that good examples backwardly change and recast the ideas and concepts they were merely supposed to exemplify? In my talk, I am going to trace what could be called the roots of the materialist use of examples in classical philosophy, maybe at the very climax of classical philosophy, namely in Hegel’s use of examples, especially in his masterpiece The Phenomenology of Spirit.