This is a new translation, with running commentary, of what is
perhaps the most important short piece of Hegel's writing. The
Preface to Hegel's first major work, the Phenomenology of
Spirit , lays ...the groundwork for all his other writing by
explaining what is most innovative about Hegel's philosophy. This
new translation combines readability with maximum precision,
breaking Hegel's long sentences and simplifying their often complex
structure. At the same time, it is more faithful to the original
than any previous translation. The heart of the book is the
detailed commentary, supported by an introductory essay. Together
they offer a lucid and elegant explanation of the text and
elucidate difficult issues in Hegel, making his claims and
intentions intelligible to the beginner while offering interesting
and original insights to the scholar and advanced student. The
commentary often goes beyond the particular phrase in the text to
provide systematic context and explain related topics in Hegel and
his predecessors (including Kant, Spinoza, and Aristotle, as well
as Fichte, Schelling, Hölderlin, and others). The commentator
refrains from playing down (as many interpreters do today) those
aspects of Hegel's thought that are less acceptable in our time,
and abstains from mixing his own philosophical preferences with his
reading of Hegel's text. His approach is faithful to the historical
Hegel while reconstructing Hegel's ideas within their own
context.
Since 1945, there have been two waves of Anglo-American writing on Hegel's political thought. The first defended it against works portraying Hegel as an apologist of Prussian reaction and a theorist ...of totalitarian nationalism. The second presented Hegel as a civic humanist critic of liberalism in the tradition of Rousseau. The first suppressed elements of Hegel's thought that challenge liberalism's individualistic premises; the second downplayed Hegel's theism. This book recovers what was lost in each wave. It restores aspects of Hegel's political thought unsettling to liberal beliefs, yet that lead to a state more liberal than Locke's and Kant's, which retain authoritarian elements. It also scrutinizes Hegel's claim to have justified theism to rational insight, hence to have made it conformable to Enlightenment standards of admissible public discourse. And it seeks to show how, for Hegel, the wholeness unique to divinity is realizable among humans without concession or compromise and what role philosophy must play in its final achievement. Lastly, we are shown what form Hegel's philosophy can take in a world not yet prepared for his science. Here is Hegel's political thought undistorted.
In 2012, philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek published what arguably is his magnum opus, the one-thousand-page tomeLess Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. A ...sizable sequel appeared in 2014,Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. In these two books, Žižek returns to the German idealist G. W. F. Hegel in order to forge a new materialism for the twenty-first century. Žižek's reinvention of Hegelian dialectics explores perennial and contemporary concerns: humanity's relations with nature, the place of human freedom, the limits of rationality, the roles of spirituality and religion, and the prospects for radical sociopolitical change.InA New German Idealism, Adrian Johnston offers a first-of-its-kind sustained critical response toLess Than NothingandAbsolute Recoil. Johnston, a leading authority on and interlocutor of Žižek, assesses the recent return to Hegel against the backdrop of Kantian and post-Kantian German idealism. He also presents alternate reconstructions of Hegel's positions that differ in important respects from Žižek's version of dialectical materialism. In particular, Johnston criticizes Žižek's deviations from the secular naturalism and Enlightenment optimism of his chosen sources of inspiration: not only Hegel, but Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud too. In response, Johnston develops what he calls transcendental materialism, an antireductive and leftist materialism capable of preserving and advancing the core legacies of the Hegelian, Marxian, and Freudian traditions central to Žižek.
Hegel is an immensely important yet difficult philosopher. His Philosophy of Mind is one of the main pillars of his thought. Michael Inwood, highly respected for his previous work on Hegel, presents ...this central work to the modern reader in an accurate new translation supported by a philosophically sophisticated editorial introduction and elucidating scholarly commentary. - ;G. W. F. Hegel is an immensely important yet difficult philosopher. Philosophy of Mind is the third part of Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, in which he summarizes his philosophical system. It is one of the main pillars of his thought. Michael Inwood presents this central work to the modern reader in an intelligible and accurate new translation---the first into English since 1894---that loses nothing of the style of Hegel's thought. In his editorial. introduction Inwood offers a philosophically sophisticated evaluation of Hegel's ideas which includes a survey of the whole of Hegel's thought and detailed analysis of the terminology he used. Extensive commentary notes enhance an edition that makes Hegel interesting to the modern reader. -.
Grounds of Pragmatic Realism shows Hegel is a major epistemologist, who disentangled Kant's critique of judgment, across the Critical corpus, from transcendental idealism, and augmented its enormous ...evaluative and justificatory significance for commonsense knowledge, the natural sciences and freedom of action.
Infinite Phenomenologybuilds on John Russon's earlier book,Reading Hegel's Phenomenology, to offer a second reading of Hegel'sPhenomenology of Spirit. Here again, Russon writes in a lucid, engaging ...style and, through careful attention to the text and a subtle attunement to the existential questions that haunt human life, he demonstrates how powerfully Hegel's philosophy can speak to the basic questions of philosophy. In addition to original studies of all the major sections of thePhenomenology, Russon discusses complementary texts by Hegel, namely,the Philosophy of Spirit, the Philosophy of Right, and theScience of Logic. He concludes with an appendix that discusses the reception and appropriation of Hegel'sPhenomenologyin twentieth-century French philosophy. As with Russon's earlier work,Infinite Phenomenologywill remain essential reading for those looking to engage Hegel's essential, yet difficult, text.
Hegel's Philosophy of Right concerns ideas on justice, moral responsibility, family life, economic activity, and the political structure of the state. It shows how human freedom involves living with ...others in accordance with publicly recognized righs and laws. This edition combines a revised translation with a cogent introduction to Hegel's work.
The concept of resistance has always been central to the reception of Hegel’s philosophy. The prevalent image of Hegel’s system, which continues to influence the scholarship to this day, is that of ...an absolutist, monist metaphysics which overcomes all resistance, sublating or assimilating all differences into a single organic ‘Whole’. For that reason, the reception of Hegel has always been marked by the question of how to resist Hegel: how to think that which remains outside of or other to the totalizing system of dialectics. In recent years the work of scholars such as Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda has brought considerable nuance to this debate. A new reading of Hegel has emerged which challenges the idea that there is no place for difference, otherness or resistance in Hegel, both by refusing to reduce Hegel’s complex philosophy into a straightforward systematic narrative and by highlighting particular moments within Hegel’s philosophy which seem to counteract the traditional understanding of dialectics. This book brings together established and new voices in this field in order to show that the notion of resistance is central to this revaluation of Hegel.
Both Hegel's philosophy and psychoanalytic theory have profoundly influenced contemporary thought, but they are traditionally seen to work in separate rather than intersecting universes. This book ...offers a new interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and brings it into conversation the work of two of the best-known contemporary psychoanalysts, Christopher Bollas and André Green. Hegel and Psychoanalysis centers a consideration of the Phenomenology on the figure of the Unhappy Consciousness and the concept of Force, two areas that are often overlooked by studies which focus on the master/slave dialectic. This book offers reasons for why now, more than ever, we need to recognize how concepts of intersubjectivity, Force, the Third, and binding are essential to an understanding of our modern world. Such concepts can allow for an interrogation of what can be seen as the profoundly false and constructed senses of community and friendship created by social networking sites, and further an idea of a "global community," which thrives at the expense of authentic intersubjective relations.
