Category: German Idealism
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Identity and Difference: Studies in Hegel’s Logic, Philosophy of Spirit, and Politics
Identity and difference (or sameness and otherness) are contrasting but interrelated terms that have played an explicit role in the development of Western philosophy at least since Plato wrote the Sophist. As Plato pointed out then, and Hegel reiterated more recently in his Science of Logic, the proper comprehension of these terms, and particularly of…
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Kantian Deeds
The book revokes and renews the tradition of Kant’s moral philosophy. Through a novel reading of contemporary approaches to Kant, Henrik Bjerre draws a new map of the human capacity for morality. Morality consists of two different abilities that are rarely appreciated at the same time. Human beings are brought up and initiated into a…
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Beauty and Truth: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics
The first book in English to attempt a full theoretical analysis of Hegel’s philosophy of art, Beauty and Truth examines Hegel’s central thesis: that both beauty and truth can be understood in terms of systematic coherence, and that art, as a purveyor of truth, embodies and reflects the beliefs of the societies from which it…
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The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel
The period from Kant to Hegel is one of the most intense and rigorous in modern philosophy. The central problem at the heart of it was the development of a new standard of theoretical reflection and of the principle of rationality itself. The essays in this volume consider both the development of Kant’s system of…
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Hegel’s Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness: Text and Commentary
Offering a new translation of the famous chapter IV (“Self-Consciousness”) of Phenomenology of Spirit, this book reflects the far-reaching insights of contemporary Hegelian scholarship. Included is extensive commentary as well as a review of its reception by such important twentieth-century thinkers as Kojeve, Heidegger, Sartre, Gadamer, Bataille, Deleuze, Lacan, and Habermas. Interest in Hegel has…
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Hegel, Heraclitus and Marx’s Dialectic
This provocative book deals with the explanatory power of the concept of ideology in the social and historical sciences. Howard Williams takes three competing concepts of ideology from across the political spectrum—those of Marx, Mannheim and Oakeshott—and asks what light they shed on fascist doctrine, a particularly crucial ideology. The objectives of this book are…
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Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Themes and Interpretations
This collection examines different themes and offers novel interpretations of Hegel’s political philosophy. Thus, it sheds new light on what has been perhaps the most controversial area of Hegelian scholarship. It includes eight essays by a group of international scholars at different stages of their career. Its distinctive contribution is that it explores both Hegel’s…
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Schelling’s Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel
Recent decades have seen a remarkable upsurge of interest in German Idealism in the English-speaking world. However, out of the three leading thinkers of the period directly after Kant—Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—Schelling has received relatively little attention. In particular, the distinctive philosophical project of Schelling’s late period, beginning in the 1820s, has been almost completely…
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Hegel’s Idea of Freedom
The book offers the first full‐length treatment in English of Hegel’s idea of freedom. It explores his theory of what it is for an individual to be free and his account of the social and political contexts in which freedom is developed, realized, and sustained. The book investigates a number of central questions concerning Hegel’s…
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The Development from Kant to Hegel
The work is an important contribution to the study of German philosophy in the English speaking world. The first of two parts, the main core of Seth s analyses of the works of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, was written in the summer of 1880 while the author was a Hibbert Travelling Scholar. The second…
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Kant and the French Revolution
To Kant, the French revolution’s central events were the transfer of sovereignty to the people in 1789 and the trial and execution of the monarch in 1792-1793. Through a contextual study, this Element argues that while both events manifested the principle of popular sovereignty, the first did so in lawful ways, whereas the latter was…
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Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature
Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature is an important new study of Hegel’s profound philosophical account of the natural world. It examines Hegel’s alleged idealism, his concepts of space and time, the conception of speculative geometry, his critical engagement with Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, his critique of Newtonian science, his concept of evolution,…
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Hegel on Religion and Politics
Although scholars have written extensively on Hegel’s treatment of religion and politics separately, much less has been written about the connections between the two in his thought. This book highlights various approaches to this intersection in Hegel’s thought and evaluates its relevance to contemporary problems, considering issues such as religious pluralism and tolerance, conflicts between…
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Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord: Why Everything is as it Seems
Revisiting Guy Debord’s seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Eric-John Russell breathes new life into a text which directly preceded and informed the revolutionary fervour of May 1968. Deepening the analysis between Debord and Marx by revealing the centrality of Hegel’s speculative logic to both, he traces Debord’s intellectual debt to Hegel in a way…
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The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters
This book confronts Schelling with Hegel, and illuminates popular culture and modern subjectivity. The feature which distinguishes the great works of materialist thought, from Lucretius’ De rerum natura through Capital to the writings of Lacan, is their unfinished character: again and again they tackle their chosen problem. Schelling’s Weltalter drafts belong to this same series, with their repeated attempt at the…
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Hegel and Marx: The Concept of Need
This text introduces the concept of need as viewed by Hegel and Marx, and places it within the context of modern need theories and theorists. The book works through key texts, including Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Marx’s Capital, and discusses the theory in relation to Soviet Communism and social democracy. DOWNLOAD: (.pdf)
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Hegel and His Critics: Philosophy in the Aftermath of Hegel
This book deals with fundamental problems in Hegel and with Hegel in relation to Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Russell, Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida, and Bataille. It reveals Hegel’s power to provoke both critical and creative thought across the complete spectrum of philosophical questions. DOWNLOAD: (.pdf)
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Philosophische Einstiege)
This book is a short and basic introduction into Hegel’s philosophy in German. The main theses Hegel has defended and the central conceptions he has developed in his philosophical system are explicated. Furthermore, aspects of Hegel’s philosophy which are relevant in contemporary philosophical debates are highlighted. Finally, aspects of Hegel’s philosophy important in current social…
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Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, with Marx’s Commentary: a Handbook for Students
In order to gain a proper perspective of Hegel’s place in the history of philosophy, it might be useful to focus on one key concept which has evolved significantly in meaning, from the time of Aristotle to Hegel. Speaking of the philosophical concept of the “category”: in Aristotle’s system, there were ten categories (or “predicaments”)…
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Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility
Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility picks up on recent revisionist readings of Hegel to offer a productive new interpretation of his notoriously difficult work, the Science of Logic. Rocío Zambrana transforms the revisionist tradition by distilling the theory of normativity that Hegel elaborates in the Science of Logic within the context of his signature treatment of negativity, unveiling how both…
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Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom
The author’s purpose is to understand the philosophical foundations of Hegel’s social theory by articulating the normative standards at work in his claim that the three central social institutions of the modern era–the nuclear family, civil society, and the constitutional state–are rational or good. Its central question is: what, for Hegel, makes a rational social…
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Hegel on the Modern Arts
Debates over the ‘end of art’ have tended to obscure Hegel’s work on the arts themselves. Benjamin Rutter opens this study with a defence of art’s indispensability to Hegel’s conception of modernity; he then seeks to reorient discussion toward the distinctive values of painting, poetry, and the novel. Working carefully through Hegel’s four lecture series…
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Hegel on the Soul: A Speculative Anthropology
In the Hegelian system of philosophical sciences, the Anthropology directly follows the Philosophy of Nature and forms the first of the three sciences of Subjective Spirit: Anthropology, Phenomenology, and Psychology. The section on Subjective Spirit is then followed by sections on Objective Spirit and Absolute Spirit. The three sections together comprise the Philosophy of Spirit…
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Hegel’s Century: Alienation and Recognition in a Time of Revolution
The remarkable lectures that Hegel gave in Berlin in the 1820s generated an exciting intellectual atmosphere which lasted for decades. From the 1830s, many students flocked to Berlin to study with people who had studied with Hegel, and both his original students, such as Feuerbach and Bauer, and later arrivals including Kierkegaard, Engels, Bakunin, and…
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G. W. F. Hegel: The Berlin Phenomenology
These are selected parts of the three volume edition of Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit edited by M. J. Petry published here as a separate work. The Berlin Phenomenology should be a reliable basic text and an accurate translation which has several important advantages. The introduction and notes prepared for the present edition should prove…
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Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit
The Philosophy of Subjective Spirit is the first section of the third part of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. First published in 1817, Hegel published two additional editions of the Encyclopedia in his lifetime, one in 1827 and the third in 1830, just a year before his untimely death. That devoted his efforts to…
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Hegel on Tragedy and Comedy: New Essays
No philosopher has treated the subject of tragedy and comedy in as original and searching a manner as G. W. F. Hegel. His concern with these genres runs throughout both his early and late works and extends from aesthetic issues to questions in the history of society and religion. Hegel on Tragedy and Comedy is the…
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Hegel’s Antiquity
Hegel’s Antiquity aims to summarize, contextualize, and criticize Hegel’s understanding and treatment of major aspects of the classical world, approaching each of the major areas of his historical thinking in turn: politics, art, religion, philosophy, and history itself. The discussion excerpts relevant details from a range of Hegel’s works, with an eye both to the ancient…
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Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns
Available in English for the first time, Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns revives discussion of the major political and philosophical tenets underlying contemporary liberalism through a revolutionary interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel’s thought. Domenico Losurdo, one of the world’s leading Hegelians, reveals that the philosopher was fully engaged with the political controversies of his time.…
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Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative
At once an introduction to Hegel and a radically new vision of his thought, this remarkable work penetrates the entirety of the Hegelian field with brevity and precision, while compromising neither rigor nor depth. One of the most original interpreters of Hegel, Jean-Luc Nancy offers a portrait as startlingly unconventional as it is persuasive, and…
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Creolizing Hegel
The 19th century German thinker G.W.F. Hegel is a towering figure in the canon of European philosophy. Indeed, most of the significant figures of European Philosophy after Hegel explicitly address his thought in their own work. Outside of the familiar territory of the Western canon, however, Hegel has also loomed large, most often as a…
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‘In Defense of Hegel’s Madness’ by Slavoj Žižek
The article is a confrontation with Robert Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, his attempt to systematically “renormalize” Hegel, i.e., to reduce his extravagant formulations to the criteria of common sense. The article analyses a number of Brandom’s “domestications” of Hegel’s speculative concepts: self-relating, determinate negation, mediation, In-itself, action, knowledge, Spirit, reconciliation, history. On…
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The Dark Side of Thought. The Body, the Unconscious and Madness in Hegel’s Philosophy
Is there a dark side to Hegelian philosophy? And if there is one, what is it exactly? This contribution aims to investigate those elements of Hegel’s speculative contributions that cannot be traced back to the clarity of a narrow rationality, but that refer to another principle of reason, which includes the role of corporeity and…
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Hegel’s Theory of Absolute Spirit as Aesthetic Theory
Hegel’s philosophy of art is to the present day one of the most influential and attractive parts of his philosophy. In my contribution I argue for the thesis that art is not alone – together with religion and philosophy – an important figure of the absolute spirit. Much more than that, art as a complex…
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Leben
Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz (April 23, 1805 – July 14, 1879) was a German philosopher and pedagogue. Born in Magdeburg, he read philosophy at Berlin, Halle and Königsberg, devoting himself mainly to the doctrines of Hegel and Schleiermacher. After holding the chair of philosophy at Halle for two years, he became, in 1833, professor at…
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The Idealism of Freedom: For a Hegelian Turn in Philosophy
In The Idealism of Freedom, Klaus Vieweg argues for a Hegelian turn in philosophy. Hegel’s idealism of freedom contains a number of epoch-making ideas that articulate a new understanding of freedom, which still shape contemporary philosophy. Hegel establishes a modern logic, as well as the idea of a social state. With his distinction between civil…
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Hegel: Der Philosoph der Freiheit
Jedes Jahr am 14. Juli soll Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ein Glas Champagner auf den Beginn der Französischen Revolution getrunken haben. Diese Revolution war das sein Leben und Denken prägende Ereignis. Das Grundmotiv der Freiheit durchzieht den gesamten Denk- und Lebensweg des bedeutendsten Philosophen des 19. Jahrhunderts. Zu Hegels 250. Geburtstag erscheint die erste umfassende…
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The Slovene Re-Actualization of Hegel’s Philosophy
To begin with a joke, the world history may have ended in 1806 at the battle of Jena where Napoleon defeated the Prussian Army, but, ironically, it was re-opened with a new reading of Hegel in one of the most provincial places on Earth in one of the most hollow periods of its history, in…
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True Sacrifice: On Hegel’s Presentation of Self-Consciousness
The paper provides a modest reading of Hegel’s treatment of self-consciousness in his Phenomenology of Spirit and tries to present it as an integral part of the overall project of the experience of consciousness leading from understanding to reason. Its immediate objective is, it is argued, to think the independence and dependence, that is the…
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‘Identity and Its Vicissitudes Hegel’s ‘Logic of Essence’ as a Theory of Ideology’ by Slavoj Žižek
…When dealing with the theme ‘Hegel and identity’, one should never forget that identity emerges only in the logic of essence, as a ‘determination-of-reflection’: what Hegel calls ‘identity’ is not a simple self-equality of any notional determination (red is red, winter is winter . . .); it is the identity of an essence which ‘stays…
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Hegel’s Logic as the Exposition of God from the End of the World
The article attempts to reconstruct the logical space within which, at the beginning of Hegel’s Logic, “being” and “nothing” are entitled to emerge and receive their names. In German Idealism, the concept of “being” is linked to the form of a proposition; Fichte grounds a new truth-value on the absolute thesis of the “thetical judgement”.…
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The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism
German Idealism is one of the most fruitful and influential movements in the history of philosophy. This book covers this era in meticulous detail, with contributions from some of the best scholars in this field, nearly all of which have been specially commissioned for this volume. Chapters set the philosophers and their work in historical…
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Hegel’s Transcendental Induction
The book challenges the orthodox account of Hegelian phenomenology as a hyper-rationalism, arguing that Hegel’s insistence on the primacy of experience in the development of scientific knowledge amounts to a kind of empiricism, or inductive epistemology. While the inductive element does not exclude an emphasis on deductive demonstration as well, Hegel’s phenomenological description of knowledge…
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‘Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology’ by Slavoj Žižek
In Tarrying with the Negative, Žižek challenges the contemporary critique of ideology, and in doing so opens the way for a new understanding of social conflict, particularly the recent outbursts of nationalism and ethnic struggle. Are we, Žižek asks, confined to a postmodern universe in which truth is reduced to the contingent effect of various…
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The Birth of Theory
Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory―Hegel did. To support this contention, Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel’s dialectic as theory. Cole explains how Hegel boldly broke from modern philosophy when he adopted medieval dialectical habits…
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‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ by G. W. F. Hegel | Peter Fuss & John Dobbins Translation
The Phenomenology of Spirit, first published in 1807, is G. W. F. Hegel’s remarkable philosophical text that examines the dynamics of human experience from its simplest beginnings in consciousness through its development into ever more complex and self-conscious forms. The work explores the inner discovery of reason and its progressive expansion into spirit, a world…
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Society of Friends of the Hegelian Dialectic
I’ve created a new online group aimed to those with an interest in the study of Hegel and related literature in dialectics. Everyone is encouraged to join and to invite any friends you might find interested in this area of study. This group is meant as a project for the long-term, as a place to…
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Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts
Throughout his career, Robert B. Pippin has examined the relationship between philosophy and the arts. With his writings on film, literature, and visual modernism, he has shown that there are aesthetic objects that cannot be properly understood unless we acknowledge and reflect on the philosophical concerns that are integral to their meaning. Philosophy by Other…
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Translating Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit and Modern Philosophy
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit stands at the crossroads of modern philosophy. Taking us from the lowest and simplest level of sense-certainty through ever more complex forms of knowing and acting, Hegel’s monumental work eventually aspires to nothing less than a blueprint for absolute knowledge: a unity of subject and object, finite and infinite, man and…
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Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life
This fresh and original book argues that the central questions in Hegel’s practical philosophy are the central questions in modern accounts of freedom: What is freedom, or what would it be to act freely? Is it possible so to act? And how important is leading a free life? Robert Pippin argues that the core of…
Simon Gros 