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

• Reason and Revolution

  - Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution, new edition. Boston, 1960.
  Excerpt: Any recognition of individual freedom consequently seemed to involve tearing down the ancient democracy. ‘That very subjective freedom which constitutes the principle and determines the peculiar form of freedom in our world – which forms… More

• From Hegel to Nietzsche

  - Lowith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche, tr. David E. Green. New York, 1964.
  Excerpt: … For Hegel, the spirit as substance and subject of history was the absolute and basic concept of his theory of being. Thus natural philosophy is just as much a spiritual discipline as are the philosophies of the state, art, religion, and… More

• La Philosophie Politique de Hegel

  - Fleischmann, Eugene. La philosophie politique de Hegel, Paris, 1964.

• Hegel: A Re-interpretation

  - Kaufmann, Walter. Hegel: A Re-interpretation, 1966.
  Excerpt: Whoever looks for the stereotype of the allegedly Hegelian dialectic [“thesis, antithesis, synthesis”] in Hegel’s Phenomenology will not find it. What one does find on looking at the table of contents is a very decided preference… More

• The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought

  - Fackenheim, Emil L. The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought. Bloomington and London, 1967
  Excerpt: Hegelian “science” is marked by an unprecedented presumptuousness. The Encyclopedia [of Philosophic Sciences] is no mere conceptual philosophical system inclusive of other conceptual philosophical systems and related to Reality as its… More

• La Science Universelle

  - Fleischmann, Eugène. La science universelle ou la logique de Hegel, Plon, Paris 1968.

• Idealism, Politics and History

  - Kelly, George Armstrong. Idealism, Politics and History. Cambridge, 1969.
  Excerpt: [Hegel] aspired to be the Aristotle of modern thought and the Proclus of Christian speculation. His deep involvement in the structure of knowledge and the rationale of all historical life – whose qualitative opposition he mediated with his… More

• 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

• Hegel’s Concept of Experience

  - Heidegger, Martin, Hegel’s Concept of Experience. New York, 1970.
  Excerpt: Hegel: 2. If concern about falling into error makes one in the meanwhile distrustful of science, which takes up its work and actually knows without any such hesitations, then one should not overlook the possibility of reversing this procedure by… More

• Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion

  - Christensen, Darrel, Ed., Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion, The Hague, 1970.
  Excerpt: This back and forth movement of the mind between the abstract and empty notion of a thing – in the above example, a chair – and those characteristics or attributes drawn from immediate experience by which the concept of that thing is to… 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 (Charles Taylor)

  - Charles Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge University Press, 1975.
  […] In fact, our difficulties just begin when we accept the central role of reason; and it was these difficulties which motivated [the Romantics] in turning away from it to fantasy, invention, and art. For if we abandon the view of spirit as endless… More

• Hegel and the Dialectic of the Ancient Philosophers

  - Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Hegel and the Dialectic of the Ancient Philosophers,” Hegel’s Dialectic, tr. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, 1976.
  Excerpt: In Plato Hegel sees the earliest development of speculative dialectic, for Plato goes beyond allowing the universal to emerge indirectly by merely confounding a point of view. That the Sophists had done too. In contrast to them, as Hegel sees it,… More

• Hegel’s Metaphysics and the Problem of Contradiction

  - Pippin, Robert. “Hegel’s Metaphysics and the Problem of Contradiction,” in Journal of the History of Philosophy 16 (1978): 301-12.
  Excerpt: Hegel’s contributions to social and political philosophy and to the philosophy of history, his lectures on the history of philosophy, and his comprehensive analysis of the details of human history are all fairly well known and often discussed.… 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

• The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After

  - Kolb, David.  The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After, Chicago, 1978.
  Excerpt: One common understanding of progress and development urges the creation or liberation of something like a pure personal individuality and a pure human society. At the same time we also feel it is important to have roots that can give us more than… More

• Hegel and Modern Society

  -

  Taylor, Charles. Hegel and Modern Society. Cambridge, 1979.

  Excerpt: Against [expressivism], Herder and others developed an alternative notion of man whose dominant image was rather tha of an expressive object. Human life was seen as having a unity rather analogous to that of a work of art, where every part or aspect… More

• Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History

  - Gillespie, Michael Allen. Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History, Chicago, 1984.
  Excerpt: From Antinomy to Dialectic Hegelian philosophy is fundamentally dialectical. The meaning and character of this dialectical essence, however, arises out of Hegel’s reception and transformation of Kant’s antinomy doctrine. While his… More

• Hegel’s Critique of the Enlightenment

  - Hinchman, Lewis. Hegel’s Critique of the Enlightenment, Gainsville 1984.
  Excerpt: … [I]nternal democracy does not have an intrinsic value for Hegel. He portrays it as an arena for caprice and subjective opinion that, in spite of their relative justification as an expression of subjective freedom, are mainly exercised in… More

• Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism

  - Smith, Steven B. Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism. Chicago and London, 1989.
  Excerpt: My purpose here is… to examine the genesis of the critique of rights-based liberalism in the philosophy of Hegel. One advantage of this approach is that as a critic of liberalism in at least its early modern or classic form, Hegel provides us… More

• The Cambridge Companion to Hegel

  - The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. Frederick C. Beiser, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
  From the publisher: Few thinkers are more controversial in the history of philosophy than Hegel. He has been dismissed as a charlatan and obscurantist, but also praised as one of the greatest thinkers in modern philosophy. No one interested in philosophy can… 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

• Logic and Existence

  - Hyppolite, Jean. Logic and Existence, tr. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen. New York, 1997
  Excerpt: If it is true, however, that thought is a dialogue, a dialogue with another or with oneself, we can indeed wonder whether being lends itself to expression and whether it does not escape radically from the Logos which claims to signify it. In ancient… More

• Hegel (Frederick Beiser)

  - Beiser, Frederick. Hegel, 2005.
  Excerpt: These religious and political controversies within the Hegelian school were not so easily resolvable because they involved an apparently intractable problem in the interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics. Namely, what is the nature of… More

• Hegel’s Practical Philosophy

  - Pippin, Robert. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, Cambridge, 2008.
  Excerpt: … What is important, Antigone implicitly asserts, is what one claims for oneself, what sort of recognition one demands; that the issue of the status of Polyneices as a family member as well as citizen is not independently real, a mere… More

• The Logic of Desire by Peter Kalkavage

  - Kalkavage, Peter, The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Paul Dry Books, 2008.  
  From the publisher: Peter Kalkavage’s The Logic of Desire guides the reader through Hegel’s great work. Given the book’s legendary difficulty, one may well ask, “Why even try to read the Phenomenology?” In his preface, Kalkavage… 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

• Less Than Nothing by Slavoj Zizek

  - Slavoj Zizek. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London, 2012.
  Excerpt: The same holds for the unreliability of the verbal reports given by Holocaust survivors: a witness who was able to offer a clear narrative of his camp experience would thereby disqualify himself. In a Hegelian way, the problem here is part of the… More

Multimedia

• Introductory Lecture to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

  - Video. Joe Rouse. An introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Wesleyan University, 27 March 2013.

• An Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

  - Video. Dr. Gregory B. Sadler, Introduction to Philosophy Course. Marist College, Spring 2013.
  In this lecture/discussion session we tackle the Introduction to a very challenging philosophical work, Georg William Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This recording is from from my Spring 2013 Introduction to Philosophy class at Marist… More