On December 26, 1817 Hegel received the invitation to take a professorial position at the recently established university in Berlin. The university was founded in 1809 in the aftermath of the Napoleonic devastation of Prussia – and one must remember the iconic moment of Hegel finishing his Phenomenology of Spirit in the midst of canon fire of the battle of Jena, witnessing the great Prussian defeat and seeing Napoleon on a white horse entering the city in October 1806. The new university was immediately known as the Humboldt University, after Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hegel’s distant friend, who was commissioned by the Prussian ministry to draw plans for its conceptual foundation…
Simon Gros 
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