Reading Hegel: The Introductions

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aakash Singh Rathore (Editor), Rimina Mohapatra (Editor)

Bringing together for the first time all of G.W.F. Hegel's major Introductions in one place, this book ambitiously attempts to present readers with Hegel's systematic thought through his Introductions alone. The Editors articulate to what extent, precisely, Hegel's Introductions truly reflect his philosophic thought as a whole. Certainly each of Hegel's Introductions can stand alone, capturing a facet of his overarching idea of truth. But compiled all together, they serve to lay out the intricate tapestry of Hegel's thought, woven with a dialectic that progresses from one book to another, one philosophical moment to another. Hegel's reflections on philosophy, religion, aesthetics, history, and law-all included here-have profoundly influenced many subsequent thinkers, from post-Hegelian idealists or materialists like Karl Marx, to the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre; from the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl to Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and other post-moderns, to thinkers farther afield, like Japan's famous Kyoto School or India's Aurobindo. This book provides the opportunity to discern how the ideas of these later thinkers may have originally germinated in Hegel's writings, as well as to penetrate Hegel's worldview in his own words, his grand architecture of the journey of the Spirit.

Genres: Philosophy, 19th Century, Theory

272 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2008

About the author

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher and one of the founding figures of German Idealism. Influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism and Rousseau's politics, Hegel formulated an elaborate system of historical development of ethics, government, and religion through the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute. Hegel was one of the most well-known historicist philosopher, and his thought presaged continental philosophy, including postmodernism. His system was inverted into a materialist ideology by Karl Marx, originally a member of the Young Hegelian faction.

Reviews

[Andrés · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am starting to realize that (re)reading Hegel is similar to (re)watching Twin Peaks. Small parts feed on the whole and little understandings here lead to greater understandings there, in a quasi endless growth cycle that probably has no end.

This book is one of those materials for re-reading once and again, with a nice preface by the editors introducing the whole corpus of Hege's philosophy.

For further re-readings I would recommend almost going backwards, from the later chapters to the first, as this implies going from the easier parts to the most difficult ones (culminating, of course, in the nightmarish unreadable preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit).