Major Works

• Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes)

  - Recommended translation: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. First published in 1807.
  Excerpt from the Preface: Besides, it is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the… More

Commentary

• Studies on Marx and Hegel

  - Hyppolite, Jean. Studies on Marx and Hegel, tr. John O’Neill. New York, 1969
  Excerpt: The Phenomenology is the history of human consciousness in its progression to Absolute Knowledge. this history is much more a description than a construction of the experiences of consciousness. Moreover, by the term “experience” we must… More

• An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel

  - Alexandre Kojeve, An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols, Basic Books, 1969.
  Man’s humanity “comes to light” only in risking his life to satisfy his human Desire – that is, his Desire directed toward another Desire. Now, to desire a Desire is to want to substitute oneself for the value desired by this Desire.… More

• The Opening Arguments of the Phenomenology

  - Taylor, Charles. “The Opening Arguments of the Phenomenology,” in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alasdair MacIntyre. New York, 1972.
  Excerpt: Hegel’s aim in the Phenomenology is to move from the “natural,” i.e. commonsense, view of consciousness to his own. He makes clear in the Introduction that he intends to take nothing for granted, that he does not intend to present… More

• Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

  - Hyppolite, Jean. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. John Heckman, 1974
  Excerpt: The dialectic that Hegel presents in the first part of his book on consciousness is not very different from Fichte’s or Schelling’s. One must begin with naïve consciousness, which knows its object immediately or, rather, thinks that it… More

• Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom

  - Rosen, Stanley. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom. New Haven, 1974.
  Excerpt: Stoic and Skeptic We have now arrived at the threshold of history in the proper sense: the war and work of self-consciousness. This is the history of the unhappiness or homelessness of the human spirit. The unhappiness, of course, is not unmitigated.… More

• Hegel’s Retreat from Eleusis

  - Kelly, George Armstrong. Hegel’s Retreat from Eleusis. Princeton, 1978.
  Excerpt: We do not know whether Hegel read Fichte’s incendiary tract against the German Burkeans, but it seems likely that he did, since it was, to say the least, hot copy among young intellectuals. In any case, the contemporary associations of lordship… More

• Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason

  - Pinkard, Terry. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason, Cambridge, 1994.
  Excerpt: The Phenomenology‘s obscure style is notorious. One of the first books ever to be written in English on Hegel was James Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel. A reviewer commented that Stirling had succeeded in keeping the secret, and, for… More

• Hegel on Self-Consciousness by Robert Pippin

  - Pippin, Robert. Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Princeton, 2010.
  Excerpt: You all at this moment know what you are doing – reading a book about Hegel, let us say – and as Elizabeth Anscombe among other made famous, you know it not by observation (the way you would know that someone else is reading something)… More

• Hegel’s Naturalism by Terry Pinkard

  - Pinkard, Terry. Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life, Oxford, 2012.
  Excerpt: In his 1807 Phenomenology, Hegel titled the sections on ancient Greece “The True Spirit.” This form of life is “true” in that it presents us with a view of what our agency would look like if we were both self-conscious (and… More