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

• Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences Part 3: Philosophy of Spirit (Wissenschaft des Geistes)

  Excerpt: The knowledge of Mind is the highest and hardest, just because it is the most ‘concrete’ of sciences. The significance of that ‘absolute’ commandment, Know thyself – whether we look at it in itself or under 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 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