Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of History

by Jean Hyppolite

Hyppolite was the most famous scholar of Hegel in modern France and teacher of five of this century's major French philosophers - Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Bataille, and Guattari. This work is an explication of the meaning of Hegel's vision of history. In it, Jean Hyppolite plots the developments - both correct and incorrect, within scholarship and historical events - of the apprehension of Hegel's "Absolute Spirit." The French figures whose thought was shaped by their encounters with Hegel's philosophy represent the extraordinary richness of the intellectual and cultural life of twentieth-century France and define our contemporary intellectual landscape, both modern and postmodern. As a thinker, a great scholar, a translator of Hegel, a professor at and a director of the Ecole Normale (1954-1963), and finally a professor at the College de France, Hyppolite was a shaping force of this landscape. Until now, Hyppolite's work was inaccesible to those who either could not read French or could not read it well enough to appreciate fully the scope and depth of his contribution to Hegel's work. Its availability in English will widen opportunities for participation in the Hegelian renaissance.

Genres: Philosophy

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

Jean Hyppolite was a French philosopher known for championing the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and other German philosophers, and educating some of France's most prominent post-war thinkers. His major works include Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Studies on Marx and Hegel.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hyppolite is een eersteklas interpreet. Enorm helder. En ik wist niet dat Hegel oorlog noodzakelijk vond voor vrijheid. Dat is nogal een claim.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

History is always the history of an individual people. The highest task that Hegel set for himself was to reconcile absolute reason with history, or with what philosophical consciousness usually regards with suspicion as something contingent, given or positive. Hence, Hyppolite contends, the 'pantragicist' character of Hegel's philosophy of objective spirit--the soul cannot remain in a beautiful repose in the realm of the pure ought but must of necessity enter into contingency and involve itself in all the pain, suffering and misery that accompanies its moments. Moments of what? Moments of the State, the real vehicle that expresses and actualizes the fate and destiny of a peoples. Yet as Jean Hyppolite and others recognize, there is yet something higher and more sovereign than even the State in Hegel's system. Such is the authority of the Absolute Spirit which encompasses, for example, the sphere of art and religion, and whose presence and intimations, in some sense, remain indecipherable from the vantage point of Objective Spirit...

[Matis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ouvrage très rapide et accessible qui, comme son nom l'indique, introduit la pensée de l'histoire de Hegel. Mais ce n'est pas tant un passage en revue de son rapport a l'histoire (la dialectique est peu évoquée) que l'évolution de la pensée de l'Histoire chez Hegel qui est ici développée. On y découvre beaucoup d'éléments fructueux ainsi que ceux qui témoignent aussi des limites de la pensée hégélienne. Bon et rapide ouvrage en somme

[Camilla Pruccoli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro breve ma denso, di comprensibile lettura critica portata avanti da Jean Hyppolite sui pensieri hegeliani attorno alla storicità e alla filosofia del diritto.
Consigliato ad ogni appassionato di materia.