Book Description
"Hegel's Geschichte der Philosophie was one of the grand products of the renaissance in historical learning that took place in early nineteenth-century Germany. . . . Hegel remains relevant today for his recognition that any self-critical philosophy must include a knowledge of its own history. A self-aware philosopher, Hegel firmly believed, knew where his ideas came from and their social and cultural context. . . . This is still the only available translation of all three volumes of Hegel's history."-Frederick C. Beiser. "The main reason why Hegel will remain worthy of study lies in his incomparable gathering together of the whole range of human experience into vital connection with what is best in that experience. . . . He is, without doubt, the Aristotle of our post-Renaissance world."-J. N. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination. G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), the influential German philosopher, believed that human history was advancing spiritually and morally according to God's purpose. At the beginning of this masterwork, Hegel writes: "What the history of Philosophy shows us is a succession of noble minds, a gallery of heroes of thought, who, by the power of Reason, have penetrated into the being of things, of nature and of spirit, into the Being of God, and have won for us by their labours the highest treasure, the treasure of reasoned knowledge." In his introduction to this Bison Book edition, Frederick C. Beiser notes the complex and controversial history of Hegel's text. He makes a case that this English-language translation by E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson is still the most reliable one. A professor of philosophy at Indiana University, Beiser is the author of The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kante to Fichte. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Helpful text, but not perfect.
Hegel has long been known as being an incomprehensible German philosopher, much like his predecessor Kant, and many others who followed, such as Heidegger and Husserl- sure to confound the casual reader and give even dedicated students headaches.In Hegel: Text and Commentary, famed translator and philosopher Walter Kaufmann, who so skillfully cleansed Nietzsche's bad name after the fallout of WW II, attempts to provide running commentary on Hegel's Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, which attempts to introduce Hegel's philosophy in a readable manner.

Kaufmann's notes are helpful in deciphering Hegel's work, but they still fall a bit short, at least for the casual reader.Unlike the eminently readable Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard, Hegel, even with a good translator and guide, is still very difficult material.I'd recommend that anyone studying Hegel's philosophy without prior knowledge of his system also pick up a copy of Fichte's "Vocation of Man", the direct predecessor to Hegel's work.Fichte's philosophy provides the foundation for understanding Hegel's, and makes deciphering his dense prose decidedly easier.

Hegelian cows here at home.
This is the work in which Hegel called the absolute that night in which all cows are black.Those people who think that philosophy is impossibly complicated might start by looking at Walter Kaufmann's comments on how bad the other translations and comments on this amazingly swift work by Hegel have been.The other bit of humor here is Hegel attacking philosophy in a way that can only seem to be a personal attack on the views of Schelling, and then Walter Kaufmann thinks Hegel lied when he told Schelling in a letter that he wasn't thinking of him personally when he was writing about how superficial philosophy seems to people who only read the stuff.What is truly astounding is how inspired people feel when they right this kind of stuff.Religion and poetry seem to be competing for inspiration that can claim to be as deep, but religious doctrines and poetic theories get rated along with stale philosophies in this kind of search for an absolute, which really might seem like a night in which all cows are black the first time through this.It helps to have a few other books around to help comprehend this stuff by putting Hegel in a context where this summary of what his first two major works might be about (he wrote his LOGIC later) strives for some importance.This could be as close to official German university philosophy as any student would ever understand, but Hegel might be found complaining here that students don't understand a lot of this any more than other people. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Philosophy and theology
This volume on the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is part of a series by Fortress Press entitled 'the Making of Modern Theology: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Texts'.Each of the volumes in the series focuses upon one particular theologian of note.These volumes are of use to students, seminarians, ministers and other readers interested in the development of theological ideas in the modern and postmodern world.Each volume is a reader of key texts from the theologian highlighted -the text entries are annotated a bit by the editors, and the editor of each volume provides an introduction setting the general stage for context and understanding.

Editor Peter Hodgson describes Hegel as being a significant theologian of the spirit for Christianity.Hegel is generally classified under the heading 'philosophy' rather than theology -- he believed the universe to be rational, and this was important in every aspect of his philosophy.Hegel envisioned his word 'Phenomenology of the Spirit' as just an introduction to a larger system he had in mind -- at over 700 pages, this is some introduction!Unfortunately, much of Hegel's hoped-for publication and writing was never completed.

Many of the texts used here in Hodgson's compilation are newly translated; explorations of Hegel's explicitly theological thought are rare.Much of Hegel's work was not published during his lifetime; much remains collected along lines of interest to philosophers looking at metaphysics and politics (Hegelian principles are very strong in later Marxist frameworks).The difference between the philosophy of religion and theology is always a tricky one to navigate; with Hegel, this can be even more confusing, given that his immediate successors rarely agreed amongst themselves about Hegel's original intentions and meanings.

Hodgson's description of Hegel as a theologian of the spirit has much to do with the ontological view of God -- both philosophy and theology get at the truth; God as spirit is a self-revealing and relational being knowable to the world in different ways.He goes beyond subjective spirit and objective spirit towards an absolute, an infinity that contains within itself the finite.

Hodgson draws on the large body of Hegel's work in a largely chronological rather than topical arrangement.Early theological writings (pre-1800) are followed by Hegel's writings at Jena; the major work 'Phenomenology of the Spirit' was done in 1807.Tracts from the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences were done from 1817 to 1830; during this period, other writings and lectures are presented.

Each volume in this series also has a selected bibliography section -- this one for Hegel is divided into collected works of Hegel, major single works by Hegel (primary sources in English), and works about Hegel's religious thought.The book well indexed.This is a very good book for scholarship.The translations of the works from the original German is new, preserving some of the language uses (masculine pronouns for God) while modifying others (gender neutral translations for terms such as Mensch, Menschen).With regard to Hegel's philosophical framework, translation can be particularly difficult for the term 'being' -- Sein, Dasein, Seiende, and Wesen are variously translated; notes accompany problematic texts.

Seriously done, but mainly philosophical
I should refrain from saying anything about who, if anyone might, would be adhering to the wrong religious doctrines in our own times.Though the legacy of Hegel after his death is controversial, this book allows us to consider him "a philosopher of religion"(p. 1), for whom "the proper object of theology is religion itself, the relationship."(p. 32).With his knowledge of philosophy, Hegel was able to break religion down into four stages, in which the Greek religion based on art was considered the second stage.Political superpower ideology seems to follow this as the Roman stage followed the height of Greek civilization.

"The time of grief came when the Romans smashed the living individualities of the peoples, putting their spirits to flight and destroying their ethical life, before extending the universality of their lordship over the dismembered singular parts.At the time of this dismembering for which there was no reconciliation, and of this universality that had no life--in this boredom of the world when peace was lord over all the civilized earth--the original identity had to rise out of its rent condition, it had to lift its eternal force above its grief and come again to its own intuition.Otherwise the human race must have perished inwardly."(p. 88).

I was most impressed by the connection between humor and legal oppression that arises in this situation, as if Hegel was also aware that comedy and law play to the same audience.

"The latter [the Stoic autonomy of thinking, which passes through the movement of the skeptical consciousness to find its truth in that shape which we have called the unhappy self-consciousness] knows what the validity of the abstract person amounts to in actuality and equally in pure thought.It knows that such validity is rather a complete loss; it is itself the conscious loss of itself and the divestment of knowledge from itself.We see that this unhappy consciousness constitutes the counterpart and completion of the comic consciousness that is perfectly happy in itself.Into the latter all divine being returns--the complete divestment of substance.The unhappy consciousness, on the other hand, is conversely the tragic fate of the certainty of self that aims to be in and for itself.It is the consciousness of the loss of all essentiality in this certainty of itself, and of the loss of even this knowledge of itself--the loss of substance as well as of self.It is the anguish that finds expression in the harsh words, God is dead."(p. 117)

"Under the [Roman] legal status, then, the ethical world [of the Greeks] and the religion of that world are submerged in the comic consciousness, and the unhappy consciousness is the knowledge of this total loss.It has lost the worth it attached to its personality both as immediate and as mediated or thought.Trust in the eternal laws of the gods is silenced, just as the oracles, which pronounced on particular questions, are dumb.The statues are now only stones from which the living souls have flown, just as are words from which faith is gone."(pp. 117-118).

A portion of Hegel's famous Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit is included in this book, in which he treats the word "God" as if being the subject of a sentence is the only proper use of the word:

"The need to represent the absolute as subject has found expression in the propositions:God is the eternal, the moral world-order, love, and so on.In such propositions the true is just baldly posited as subject, but it is not presented as the movement of reflecting itself into itself.In a proposition of this kind one begins with the word God.Of itself, this is a meaningless sound, a mere name; it is only the predicate that says what God is, and gives God content and meaning; only when we get to the end of the proposition does the empty beginning become actual knowledge.This being so, it is not clear why one does not speak solely of the eternal, the moral world-order, and so on, as the ancients did, of pure concepts, of being, the One and so on, of what is the meaning, without adding the meaningless sound as well.But it is just this word that indicates that what is posited is not a being or essence or universal in general, but something reflected into itself, a subject."(pp. 95-96).

This book might be worthwhile for anyone who needs to brush up on how Hegel thinks about reflection.In July 1802, `The Critical Journal of Philosophy' published Hegel's FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE, in which Hegel criticized the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte.The Introduction of that work is called The Culture of Reflection (pp. 73-82) in this book, and reveals Hegel's awareness of the deepest thinkers of his own time:

"Of course, the inner must be externalized; intention must become effective in action; immediate religious sentiment must be expressed in external gestures; and faith, though it flees from the objectivity of cognition, must become objective to itself in thought, concepts, and words."(p. 75).

"If an artist cannot give truth to what actually exists . . ." (p. 81) "then he will take refuge in feeling, in yearning and sentimentality as his remedy against actuality, spreading tears on the cheeks of the vulgar and bringing an `Oh Lord' to their lips.Thus his figures will indeed look away beyond the actual situation toward heaven, but they will do so like bats that are neither bird nor beast, and belong neither to earth nor to sky."(p. 82).

Near the end of the book, Hegel's lectures on religion include the story of Adam, Eve, the tree of knowledge, and "Moreover, the serpent says that by eating the fruit of the tree Adam and Eve will become like God, and this appeals to human pride."(p. 234).Indeed.

thoughtful approach
when Hegel's name is mentioned in philosophy, usually people listen.Hodgson shows a side of Hegel that i previously had little to no knowledge of--his spiritual ideas.this book provides insight and understanding to the 'absolute of absolutes' that Hegel incorporates into his modern thought. this merger of philosophical ideas from with the gospel message of Christianity allows one to understand that the complexity of philosophy, especially with Hegel, can be articulated to others for their growth as Christians.this is definitely a worthwhile read about an enlightening topic. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Review of Metaphysics, published by Philosophy Education Society, Inc. on June 1, 2003. The length of the article is 657 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Schriften und Entwurfe (1799-1808).(Book Review)
Author: Riccardo Pozzo
Publication: The Review of Metaphysics (Refereed)
Date: June 1, 2003
Publisher: Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
Volume: 56Issue: 4Page: 882(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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Customer Reviews (1)

Unique work of Hegel
This is a superb look at the philosophy of the young Hegel.Address issues regarding ethics and metaphysics along with politics and religion that ever student of these arts must read!A good work to gain insight to Hegel's later work regarding the State and Jews. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
From the complete three-volume critical edition of Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, this edition extracts the full text and footnotes of the 1827 lectures, making the work available in a convenient form for study. Of the lectures that can be fully reconstructed, those of 1827 are the clearest, the maturest in form, and the most accessible to nonspecialists. In them, readers will find Hegel engaged in lively debates and in important refinements of his treatment of the concept of religion, the Oriental religions and Judaism, Christology, the Trinity, the God-world relationship, and many other topics.
This edition contains a new editorial introduction as well as critical annotations on the text and tables, bibliography, and glossary from the complete edition. The result of an international collaborative effort on the part of Walter Jaeschke, Ricardo Ferrara, and Peter C. Hodgson, the new edition is appearing simultaneously in German, English, and Spanish. The English edition has been prepared by a team consisting of Robert F. Brown (University of Delaware), Peter C. Hodgson (Vanderbilt University), and J. Michael Stewart (Farnham, England), with the assistance of H. S. Harris (York University). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A great philosopher on importance of history!
I read this book for a graduate class in history.Hegel's philosophy of history is perhaps the most fully developed philosophical theory of history that attempts to discover meaning or direction in history.Hegel incorporates a deeper historicism into his philosophical theories than his predecessors or successors. According to Hegel, the events whose story is told by political and legal history can be given a philosophical interpretation that will bring out its philosophical meaning.He does this himself in his lectures on the Philosophy of History.He views it to be a central task for philosophy to comprehend its place in the unfolding of history.History is for Hegel the development of Freedom, or rather, of the consciousness of Freedom.History is the process by which Spirit becomes conscious of itself.Individual thinkers, artists, and historical actors are primarily the means or instruments by which the collective spirit (God in the world) becomes conscious of truth.

Hegel constructs world history into a narrative of stages of human freedom, from the public freedom of the polis and the citizenship of the Roman Republic, to the individual freedom of the Protestant Reformation, to the civic freedom of the modern state.He attempts to incorporate the civilizations of India and China into his understanding of world history, though he regards those civilizations as static and therefore pre-historical.He constructs specific moments as "world-historical" events that were in the process of bringing about the final, full stage of history and human freedom.For example, Napoleon's conquest of much of Europe is portrayed as a world-historical event doing history's work by establishing the terms of the rational bureaucratic state.Hegel finds reason in history; but it is a latent reason, and one that can only be comprehended when the fullness of history's work is finished.

Many in Western Europe saw Europe or the Western European nations as the pinnacle of historical development, poised to carry their mission civilisatrice to Asia, Africa, Oceania.Yes, they could say, ancient civilizations had contributed to the eventual emergence of modern European civilization, but Europe had integrated what was valuable in those ancient insights into a higher form and it could now turn around and offer this higher form of culture to the rest of humanity who had remained "backward" and "underdeveloped."Hegel has very little to say about the New World.He acknowledges that the Native Americans have been overtaken by Europeans, thus the New World is a continuation of the Old World in its civilization and culture.He sees history progressing in America (populated by Englishmen), but finds that it has not matured yet.He sees America as a growing, prosperous, and industrious nation with a population that is a federation of people who love freedom.However, the nation is not politically fixed yet and he thinks, "a real state and a real government will arise only after a distinction of classes has arisen, when wealth and poverty become extreme."However, this can't happen as long as America has vast territory for people to expand and populate, he thinks these changes can't come about until America is as crowded as Europe so that people agitate each other and clamor for change.I think Hegel foresaw the Civil War.I think the America he ultimately envisioned is finally here today.Our country seems to be equally divided politically and I am not sure our present political institutions can hold us together.

Hegel once described Napoleon, whom he observed in the flesh just before or after one of Napoleon's major victories, as "the world spirit on horseback."Napoleon at that time was a major expression of the dynamic process which was transforming Europe in a certain direction.When Napoleon had served his purpose, he was discarded by the World Spirit, which then adopted other political leaders as its means.

It is worth observing that Hegel's philosophy of history is not the caricature of speculative philosophical reasoning that analytic philosophers sometimes paint it.His philosophical approach is not based solely on foundational a priori reasoning.Instead he proposes an "immanent" encounter between philosophical reason and the historical given.His prescription is that the philosopher should seek to discover the rational within the real--not to impose the rational upon the real."To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason."Hegel's approach is neither purely philosophical nor purely empirical; instead, he undertakes to discover within the best historical knowledge of his time, an underlying rational principle that can be philosophically articulated.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in philosophy, political science, and history.
... Read more

Book Description
Hegel was not only a great philosopher but a great historian of philosophy.He invented the idea of the philosophical tradition as a discussion among philosophers extending over centuries centering on a few main philosophical problems.This conceptual scheme, widely accepted in histories of philosophy, emerged in Hegel's lectures at the same time as German idealism itself.This new abridgment of a well-known edition makes the main insights of Hegel's famous LECTURES ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY widely available in an inexpensive edition.

Based on the second amended edition of the GESCHICHTE DER PHILOSOPHIE published in 1840, this edition--carefully prepared by Michelet, one of Hegel's students, and ably translated by E.S. Holdane and Frances H. Simson--was first published in England in 1892.Reprinted several times in the origianl 600-page, three-volume presentation, the work has continued to interest scholars for the insight it affords into Hegel's view of the history of philosophy, for an understanding of his own theory, and in itself, as the first philosophical history of philosophy.In this student-oriented text, Professor Tom Rockmore selects the most significant material in a one-volume abridgment.

A short introduction explains the purpose and principles of the selections and assesses the continued importance of the work.This is followed by selections that include parts of the Introduction to the discussion of Greek philosophy, as well as the sections on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the Introduction to modern philosophy; and then the sections on Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and the Final Result. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A great philosopher on importance of history!
I read this book for a graduate class in history.Hegel's philosophy of history is perhaps the most fully developed philosophical theory of history that attempts to discover meaning or direction in history.Hegel incorporates a deeper historicism into his philosophical theories than his predecessors or successors. According to Hegel, the events whose story is told by political and legal history can be given a philosophical interpretation that will bring out its philosophical meaning.He does this himself in his lectures on the Philosophy of History.He views it to be a central task for philosophy to comprehend its place in the unfolding of history.History is for Hegel the development of Freedom, or rather, of the consciousness of Freedom.History is the process by which Spirit becomes conscious of itself.Individual thinkers, artists, and historical actors are primarily the means or instruments by which the collective spirit (God in the world) becomes conscious of truth.

Hegel constructs world history into a narrative of stages of human freedom, from the public freedom of the polis and the citizenship of the Roman Republic, to the individual freedom of the Protestant Reformation, to the civic freedom of the modern state.He attempts to incorporate the civilizations of India and China into his understanding of world history, though he regards those civilizations as static and therefore pre-historical.He constructs specific moments as "world-historical" events that were in the process of bringing about the final, full stage of history and human freedom.For example, Napoleon's conquest of much of Europe is portrayed as a world-historical event doing history's work by establishing the terms of the rational bureaucratic state.Hegel finds reason in history; but it is a latent reason, and one that can only be comprehended when the fullness of history's work is finished.

Many in Western Europe saw Europe or the Western European nations as the pinnacle of historical development, poised to carry their mission civilisatrice to Asia, Africa, Oceania.Yes, they could say, ancient civilizations had contributed to the eventual emergence of modern European civilization, but Europe had integrated what was valuable in those ancient insights into a higher form and it could now turn around and offer this higher form of culture to the rest of humanity who had remained "backward" and "underdeveloped."Hegel has very little to say about the New World.He acknowledges that the Native Americans have been overtaken by Europeans, thus the New World is a continuation of the Old World in its civilization and culture.He sees history progressing in America (populated by Englishmen), but finds that it has not matured yet.He sees America as a growing, prosperous, and industrious nation with a population that is a federation of people who love freedom.However, the nation is not politically fixed yet and he thinks, "a real state and a real government will arise only after a distinction of classes has arisen, when wealth and poverty become extreme."However, this can't happen as long as America has vast territory for people to expand and populate, he thinks these changes can't come about until America is as crowded as Europe so that people agitate each other and clamor for change.I think Hegel foresaw the Civil War.I think the America he ultimately envisioned is finally here today.Our country seems to be equally divided politically and I am not sure our present political institutions can hold us together.

Hegel once described Napoleon, whom he observed in the flesh just before or after one of Napoleon's major victories, as "the world spirit on horseback."Napoleon at that time was a major expression of the dynamic process which was transforming Europe in a certain direction.When Napoleon had served his purpose, he was discarded by the World Spirit, which then adopted other political leaders as its means.

It is worth observing that Hegel's philosophy of history is not the caricature of speculative philosophical reasoning that analytic philosophers sometimes paint it.His philosophical approach is not based solely on foundational a priori reasoning.Instead he proposes an "immanent" encounter between philosophical reason and the historical given.His prescription is that the philosopher should seek to discover the rational within the real--not to impose the rational upon the real."To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason."Hegel's approach is neither purely philosophical nor purely empirical; instead, he undertakes to discover within the best historical knowledge of his time, an underlying rational principle that can be philosophically articulated.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in philosophy, political science, and history.
... Read more