J. Melvin Woody

As rector of the Gymnasium at Nuremburg between 1808 and 1811, Hegel attempted to introduce his young students to his system of philosophy in courses spread over three years. Karl Rosenkranz edited Hegel’s course notes and published the results under the title, Philosophische Propaedeutic in his 1840 edition of Hegel’s collected works. English translations of portions of the Propaedeutic by W. T. Harris were published in the 1860’s in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy and have since appeared in Jacob Loewenberg’s Hegel Selections. A. V. Miller has now reworked and completed Harris’s translation on the basis of subsequent, somewhat expanded German editions. The editors introduce the volume with a helpful account of Hegel’s pedagogical practice and his thoughts about how to introduce philosophy to young students of high school age. They have wisely ignored the chronological ordering of the most recent German edition. Instead, they present the courses in the order in which Hegel taught them, hoping thereby to provide a short, but comprehensive introduction to Hegel’s system in the very form and format he employed himself.

A critical commentary on Hegel’s entire system built around the structure of the Encyclopedia would be a welcome addition to the English literature. Findlay’s Hegel: A Re-Examination provides a synoptic overview of Hegel’s philosophy, but its scope does not permit close attention to Hegel’s argument. At first glance, Inwood’s Hegel seems to address the need for a more detailed commentary. In a hefty volume of over 500 pages, which was written for Routledge & Kegan Paul’s series on “The Arguments of the Philosophers,” Inwood sets out to tackle Hegel’s system as a whole.

One must freely admit that there is here a sort of circle from which, so it seems, there is no way of escape. In order the order of efficient causes, we assume that we are free so that we may think of ourselves as subject to moral laws in the order of ends. And we think of ourselves as subject to these laws because we have attributed to ourselves freedom of the will. Freedom and self-legislation of the will are both autonomy and are hence reciprocal concepts.Post-traumatic stress disorder stems from an overwhelming experience of complete helplessness. The traumatized victim has utterly lost all sense of agency. He or she may well dissociate from that helpless, passive self and become...

To be free is to escape all limitations and obstacles—or so we think at first. But if we probe further, we discover that freedom embraces its own necessities, a set of conditions without which it could not exist. _Freedom's Embrace_ explores these necessities of freedom. J. Melvin Woody surveys competing conceptions of freedom and traces debates about the nature and reality of freedom to confusions about knowledge, humanity, and nature that are rooted in some of the most fundamental assumptions of modern Western thought. The preemption of freedom as an exclusively human privilege with all nature relegated to mechanical necessity is a fatal error that renders both humanity and nature equally unintelligible. What distinguishes human beings from other animals is not freedom but the use of symbols, which vastly extends the range of available options and enables us to envision freedom as an ideal by which customary institutions and norms may be judged and transformed. By carefully surveying its necessary conditions and limitations, Woody reconciles the salient competing conceptions of freedom and weaves them together into a richer and broader theory that resolves old controversies and opens the way toward an ethics of freedom that can meet the challenges of relativism and nihilism that arise from recognizing the historicity and malleability of culture