Hegel's Philosophy of Mind

by William Wallace

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Genres: Philosophy

408 pages, Paperback

Published February 19, 2015

About the author

William Wallace (11 May 1844 – 18 February 1897) was a Scottish philosopher and academic who became fellow of Merton College and White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...

Reviews

[Erick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the last volume of Hegel's three volume Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences and was also the conclusion to his system. The subsequent works were largely expansions and lectures fleshing out what was laid out in the Phenomenology Of Spirit/Mind (his introduction to the encyclopedia), the Science Of Logic, the Philosophy Of Nature and the Philosophy Of Mind (the last three being the encyclopedia). I have now read all of the above. I am no where close to being a Hegelian, but I thought him well worth reading and I do recommend him but not without reading Fichte and Schelling as well. They all have their strengths and weaknesses.
There wasn't a whole lot new here. A lot of it was a recapitulation of ideas already set forth in previous works. He does go more into his concept of freedom though. Of course, freedom is a process that needs to be worked out, just as optimum consciousness is a process involving spirit/mind, objectivity/subjectivity, particularity/universality, etc -all notions discussed before. Much of this work deals with the psychology of freedom, if one can use the phrase and it not be an anachronism. I did note that Hegel addresses the charge of pantheism that was often leveled at philosophy, and at Idealism specifically, at the time; I found his response interesting. The last part of the book was probably the most engaging.
It appears to be the first time he went into more detail as to the political ramifications of his system. This is something he expanded on in the Philosophy Of Right.
This translation was by William Wallace, who also translated the Science Of Logic edition that I read previously. I wanted to read older translations because I am intending to research British and American Idealism in the future and these older translations are important context and/or material for that. I have seen some criticisms of Wallace's translations but I think it a fair one; and being acquainted with German Idealism already, I think he got the concepts across adequately. His introduction was a bit long, taking up half the book; but being interested in the influence that German Idealism had on the English speaking West is partly what I am interested in, so I wasn't that bothered by the length of the introduction. The print, I will say, is very small, so the book would actually be longer than it appears if the font were a more appropriate size.
I am considering reading Hegel's Philosophy Of Right and the Philosophy Of History next, but there's some works of Schelling I'd still like to read first.

[Aren Lerner · Rating 5 out of 5]

The section on the phenomenology of mind was phenomenal!