Terry Pinkard

Hegel remains widely known but largely unread in Anglo-American philosophy. Although the earlier hostility to his thought in these circles has begun to fade, Hegel still remains for many philosophers a more or less peripheral figure, somebody to be taught once other subjects in the philosophy department have been covered. This is partly because of his obscure style and mostly because of the standard picture of Hegel that remains in the psychic geography of many academic philosophers. Hegel is conceived as the last great thinker who tried to fashion a unified systematic picture of God, man and the world through something called dialectic. On this standard view, Hegel is seen as arguing for a kind of grand Spirit who is gradually coming to self-consciousness by struggling through the contradictions He has created, using people as instruments for His coming to self-consciousness, until finally He succeeds somewhere in Berlin. Spirit-God comes to full self-consciousness and as parts of this grand Spirit-God, we too come to a full awareness of what we really are. This kind of grand metaphysical cosmology and theodicy does not fit the more skeptical temperaments of many twentieth-century academic thinkers.

Few books in Hegel scholarship have been as anticipated as H. S. Harris's commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Harris has long been one of the leading commentators and translators of Hegel's pre-Phenomenology works and life, and he was forcefully present at the creation of both the British and the North American Hegel societies. Probably nobody in the Anglophone philosophical world knows the details of all the ins and outs of Hegel's book like Harris does. The wait for his own comments on Hegel's book is now over, and the result is a thick, dense, often-rewarding commentary, even longer than the already-long book that is its subject. The commentary is replete with cross-references to the other parts of the texts and to Hegel's other works, and puts Harris's immense and bounteous erudition on display.

This review of peter hodgson's new english translation of hegel's "lectures on the philosophy of religion", Part iii, And of two other books on hegel, Includes a report on plans for retranslating the entire "lectures". A new edition is made feasible by the hegel archiv's ability to construct a superior critical text of each of the four lecture series (1821, 1824, 1827, 1831) from lasson plus additional recently-Discovered auditors' transcripts. Stephen dunning's book on hegel and hamann, And james yerkes' on hegel's christology, Disagree emphatically on the suitability of hegel's conceptual framework for doing justice to the nature of christianity

IT IS A TRUISM THAT HEGEL took much of his program from Kant, but it has always been a matter of great dispute as to just what he took, how much he took, and how much he altered and added to the Kantian program. Since Kant is currently at a high point in acceptance in Anglo-American philosophical circles, a fresh look at Hegel's adoption and criticisms of that program will perhaps not only shed new light on Hegel but also point the way to a new integration of Hegelian themes in contemporary thought. In Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, Robert Pippin goes a long way to doing just that. Pippin provides a balanced philosophical account of Hegel and his program by arguing, among other things, that Hegel's work should be understood as a transformation of the Kantian idea of deriving all the conditions of knowledge from the transcendental unity of apperception, a special kind of self-conscious awareness of objects. The results are impressive.

Much of contemporary philosophy, political theory, and social thought has been shaped directly or indirectly by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, though there is considerable disagreement about how his work should be understood. He has been described both as a metaphysician and characterized as an ironic narrator who anticipated the character of philosophy after metaphysics. His position is equally ambiguous with regard to his political thought. He has been construed both as an enemy of the liberal state and as a friend of freedom. This volume's revisionist reassessment, building on the scholarship of Klaus Hartmann, explores these ambiguities in favor of a non-metaphysical reading of Hegel's arguments. It also shows how the foundations of his political thought support a liberal democratic state. This reappraisal of Hegel's arguments resituates him as a philosopher who anticipates the difficulties of post-modernity and offers a basis for reassessing ontology, aesthetics, and revolution. Philosophers and those doing work in political theory will find this volume of great interest.

Over the last several years, C. B. Macpherson has attempted to present a far-reaching critique of the theories underlying and justifying capitalist social systems. Beginning with a critique of the classical theories of capitalism, he has extended it to the later formulations offered by j. S. Mill and T. H. Green, along with the most recent formulation offered by john Rawls. The guiding thread throughout his writing has been the critique of the model of persons which underpin the various formulations of capitalist theory. What I would like to do in this paper is to present what I think to be a stronger defense of Macpherson's argument than Macpherson has himself given, since I think it can be shown that at certain crucial points his argument is necessarily flawed for the point which he is trying to make.

The Phenomenology of Spirit is both one of Hegel's most widely read books and one of his most obscure. The book is the most detailed commentary on Hegel's work available. It develops an independent philosophical account of the general theory of knowledge, culture, and history presented in the Phenomenology. In a clear and straightforward style, Terry Pinkard reconstructs Hegel's theoretical philosophy and shows its connection to ethical and political theory. He sets the work in a historical context and shows the contemporary relevance of Hegel's thought for European and Anglo-American philosophers. The principal audience for the book is teachers and students of philosophy, but the great interest in Hegel's work and the clarity of Pinkard's exposition ensure that historians of ideas, political scientists, and literary theorists will also read it.