Hegel: Metaphysics

Introduction

No scholarly consensus exists about the nature and evaluation of Hegel’s “metaphysics.” There is a commonplace view, prevalent since the 19th century, in which Hegel is understood as proposing an “extravagant” God-centered ontology, and while some contemporary Hegel interpreters endorse accounts along these general lines, it is now commonly contested by many specialists in the field. In this traditional view, humans are singled out from the rest of nature in terms of their possession of “spirit” (Geist)—a notion understood as a terminological variant of the concept of God, although a somewhat unorthodox and pantheistic-leaning one. Stressing God’s immanence in the world, this concept becomes linked to a Eurocentric triumphalist account of history, with God’s increasing presence in the world being identified with the ways “reason” and “freedom” had purportedly developed in the practices and institutions of European society. Understood along such lines Hegel’s metaphysics is seldom thought to be of relevance to contemporary philosophy. However, in terms of capturing the central features of Hegel’s philosophy, the traditional interpretation had been challenged from the decades after Hegel’s death, and, similarly, nontraditional approaches have from time to time linked Hegel to movements critical of traditional metaphysics, such as existentialism, phenomenology, philosophical hermeneutics, and American pragmatism. Recently a variety of nontraditional views have been gaining strength within academic philosophical interpretations of Hegel, generating debates over the nature of Hegel’s metaphysical commitments.

Introductory Works

Hegel is a notoriously difficult philosopher to approach for the first time. Introductions, such as Beiser 2005 and Houlgate 2005, have to walk the fine line between merely reproducing Hegel’s difficult and idiosyncratic terminology and rendering his ideas in a language that does not do justice to his ideas. The following offer a variety of different routes into Hegel’s thought.

Beiser, Frederick. Hegel. New York: Routledge, 2005.
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A clearly written introduction. Rejects many elements of the traditional view, interpreting Hegel as a conceptual realist. Concepts are not mental representations but features of worldly things responsible for their being the sorts of things they are. He is critical of approaches that overassimilate Hegel’s idealism to Kant’s transcendental idealism.
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Houlgate, Stephen. An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
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A second edition of the earlier Freedom, Truth and History (New York: Routledge, 1991). A clear and comprehensive account by a major contemporary interpreter of Hegel. The centrality of religion to Hegel’s approach is defended but Hegel is freed from many of the extravagances of traditional interpretations.
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Pinkard, Terry. Hegel: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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Much more than a biography, the main features of Hegel’s works are presented clearly and systematically in the context of their time and within a very readable account of Hegel’s life and career.
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Redding, Paul. “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2014.
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Central areas of Hegel’s work presented in an introductory way and alternative interpretative frameworks surveyed.
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Dictionaries and Handbooks

The dictionary format, as in Burbidge 2008, Magee 2010 and Inwood 1992, proves invaluable when dealing with Hegel with his reliance on often idiosyncratic “technical” words.

Burbidge, John. Historical Dictionary of Hegelian Philosophy. 2d ed. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2008.
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Written by a major contemporary interpreter, this “historical dictionary” is extremely good in providing bite-sized intelligible explanations of difficult concepts. Also helpful in its account of those influenced by Hegel as well as the approaches of recent interpreters.
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Inwood, Michael. A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
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While more than a dictionary, the format makes this work by a major Hegel interpreter a helpful resource for those attempting to find their way around Hegel’s difficult concepts. The dictionary is preceeded by two essays, one on the development of the German philosophical vocabulary up to Hegel’s time.
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Jaeschke, Walter. Hegel Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Schule. 2d ed. Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Melzler, 2010.
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Extensive German “handbook” in which details of Hegel’s life and work, as well as the differences that emerged among his followers after his death, are laid out comprehensively and systematically over more than 500 pages. An extensive bibliography accompanies each major section. An inexhaustible and invaluable resource.
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Magee, Glen Alexander. The Hegel Dictionary. London: Continuum, 2010.
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Intended for use at introductory levels of engagement with Hegel, this dictionary helpfully includes explications of some of Hegel’s striking literary tropes from texts such as Phenomenology of Spirit.
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Synoptic and Comprehensive Interpretations of Hegel’s Metaphysics

One axis around which various recent interpretations of Hegel have turned concerns the degree to which Hegel had followed Kant’s “critique” of traditional metaphysics. The traditional view (e.g., Taylor 1975) portrays Hegel as effectively reasserting the type of substantive metaphysics that Kant sought to replace. Antithetical to these are various “post-Kantian” interpretations (e.g., Brinkmann 2011, Pinkard 1994, Pippin 1989) that construe Hegel as developing and extending the main critical thrust of Kant’s approach. A third contemporary approach can be described as a “revised metaphysical” interpretation (e.g., Houlgate 2005 [cited under Introductory Works], Stern 2008), which, while critical of the post-Kantian readings, nevertheless attributes to Hegel metaphysical claims that are somewhat more plausible to most modern readers and less theocentric than those traditionally ascribed.

Brinkmann, Klaus. Idealism without Limits: Hegel and the Problem of Objectivity. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2011.
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Portrays Hegel as extending Kant’s “Copernican revolution” and overcoming the subjectivist elements of Kant’s own transcendental idealism. Hegel’s metaphysics is portrayed as radically immanentist, paralleling hermeneutic or pluralistic “interpretationist” approaches that are critical of both traditional metaphysics and the positivistic restriction of objective thought to the positive sciences.
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Inwood, Michael. Hegel. London: Routledge, 2006.
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First published in 1983 in the Routledge series “The Arguments of the Philosophers.” Rather than attempting to make Hegel’s ideas easily assimilable for the reader, this book presents them in a way that aims to retain their “strangeness.” A systematic rendering of the “traditional” Hegel.
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Kreines, James. “Hegel’s Metaphysics: Changing the Debate.” Philosophy Compass 1 (2006): 466–480.
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Addresses in a clear way the contemporary debate over the question of Hegel’s metaphysics and advances a broadly “revised metaphysical” view that is purportedly compatible with contemporary mainstream approaches to metaphysics.
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Kreines, James. Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
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Reasserts the primacy of metaphysics in Hegel’s theoretical philosophy, arguing against a perceived overassimilation of Hegel’s project to a Kantian focus on the epistemological credentials of metaphysical claims. Hegel’s metaphysics can be compared to forms of metaphysics in post-positivist analytic philosophy.
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Pinkard, Terry. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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A reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that has been influential in the development of the “post-Kantian” interpretation. The thesis of the “sociality of reason” links Hegel’s epistemology to the various pragmatist approaches to Hegel within recent analytic philosophy.
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Pippin, Robert B. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
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An important and influential work that effectively initiated the recent “post-Kantian” interpretation of Hegel. Hegel’s notion of “spirit” is treated as a development of Kant’s “transcendental unity of apperception.” This work has also been important in relation to “analytic” interpretations of Hegel.
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Rosen, Michael. Hegel’s Dialectic and Its Criticism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
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Accepts a traditional neo-Platonist interpretation of Hegel. Hegel’s dialectic is criticized because its purported attempt to absorb any possible critique into its system can only quarantine that system from the possibility of any rational critique. These are telling criticisms that, however, presuppose an interpretation of Hegel that many others contest.
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Russon, John. Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
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Offers a clear and comprehensive study of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit from a perspective sympathetic to contemporary Continental philosophy.
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Stern, Robert, “Hegel’s Idealism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. Edited by Frederick C. Beiser, 135–173. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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Critical of Pippin 1989 and other “post-Kantian” readings and reasserts Hegel’s ontological realism. But Hegel’s ontology is not that of the traditionalists and is more akin to an Aristotelian general ontology mapping the general features of “being.” Included as chapter 1 of Stern’s Hegelian Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
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Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
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While treating “spirit” as a traditional object of metaphysics, Taylor draws parallels between “expressivist” aspects of Hegel’s philosophy and language-based philosophical movements in the 20th century. Such parallels have been exploited by others in order to extract Hegel from traditional metaphysical assumptions, however, giving Taylor’s account a somewhat transitional status.
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Logic and Metaphysics

Hegel’s logic as presented in his Science of Logic is clearly not a “formal” approach to logic. Most commonly it is said that it constitutes a “metaphysics” or an “ontology,” but, again, interpretative differences once more reassert themselves with regard to interpreting Hegel’s major text. Against both traditional and revised metaphysical readings of Hegel’s “speculative logic” (e.g., Horstmann 2006, Houlgate 2008) some advocate approaches that read it as more aligned with Kant’s “transcendental logic” (Burbidge 2011, di Giovanni 2005, Wolff 2013). On the latter reading, rather than being metaphysics, Hegel’s logic replaces metaphysics as conventionally understood.

Bowman, Brady. Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
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A complex contribution to the revised metaphysical view. Hegel’s metaphysics is portrayed as having more continuity with pre-Kantian metaphysics than post-Kantians allow. At its center is a unique logic—the logic of absolute negativity—that underlies and unifies both intentional and objective dimensions of reality.
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Burbidge, John. “Conceiving.” In A Companion to Hegel. Edited by Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 159–174. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
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Burbidge argues that the traditional reading of Hegel’s logic as metaphysics insufficiently attends to its more conventional logical features. The topic of logic concerns the contents of thinking processes and cannot be so straightforwardly identified with the world—being—itself.
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Carlson, David Gray, ed. Hegel’s Theory of The Subject. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
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Contrary to what seems suggested by the title, this is a collection of interpretative essays on Hegel’s logic, often written from different viewpoints. Includes a consideration of Hegel’s often ignored “subjective logic,” as presented in the final book of Science of Logic.
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di Giovanni, George. “Hegel’s Anti-Spinozism: The Transition to Subjective Logic and the End of Classical Metaphysics.” In Hegel’s Theory of the Subject. Edited by David Gray Carlson, 30–43. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
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Often ignored sections of Science of Logic—the so-called subjective logic—show the depth of Hegel’s critique of any traditional ontological understanding of the logical categories, including a Spinozist one as advocated by Houlgate. Logic is meant as a replacement for, not a realization of, traditional metaphysics.
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Horstmann, Rolf-Peter. “Substance, Subject and Infinity: A Case Study of the Role of Logic in Hegel’s System.” In Hegel: New Directions. Edited by Katerina Deligorgi, 69–84. Chesham, UK: Acumen, 2006.
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Criticizes post-Kantian interpretations. The Phenomenology of Spirit, on which they rely, presupposes the categories made explicit in the Science of Logic—the work to which the reader of the Phenomenology is meant to be lead.
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Houlgate, Stephen. “Hegel’s Logic.” In Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. Edited by Frederick C. Beiser, 111–134. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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Houlgate advocates a primarily ontological view of Hegel’s logic and offers strong defenses of such a philosophical stance. The apparent parallelism between the structures of thought and the structures of being suggest a somewhat Spinozistic reading of Hegel.
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Longuenesse, Béatrice. Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics. Translated by Nicole J. Simek. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511487262Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Part 1 of this book is a translation of Hegel et la critique de la métaphysique: Étude sur la doctrine de l’essence, first published in 1981 (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin). Links Hegel’s speculative logic to Kant’s transcendental logic in ways broadly similar to Pippin 1989 (cited under Synoptic and Comprehensive Interpretations of Hegel’s Metaphysics).
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Pippin, Robert. “Hegel’s Logic of Essence.” Schelling-Studien, Bd. 1 (2013): 73–97.
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Explores the dynamics of Hegel’s use of the essence–appearance distinction in contrast to Kant and as exemplifying Hegel’s logical project as a “comprehensive theory of all possible modalities of sense-making” (p. 73). This in turn is used to shed light on the significance of contradiction in Hegel’s system.
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Redding, Paul. “The Role of Logic ‘Commonly So Called’ in Hegel’s Science of Logic.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22.2 (2014): 281–301.
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Argues that both Hegel’s understanding of Leibnizian formal logic and the significance it has for his own science of logic have been generally underappreciated.
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Wolff, Michael. Der Begriff des Widerspruchs: Eine Studie zur Dialektik Kants und Hegels. Königstein, Germany: Hain-Athenäum, 1981.
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Helpfully connects Hegel’s account of negation and contradiction to Kant’s precritical work.
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Wolff, Michael. “Science of Logic.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel. Edited by Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards, 313–319. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
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Hegel’s speculative logic cannot be simply identified with Kant’s transcendental logic, but rather combines elements of what Kant treats separately as transcendental and general logic. The continuity with Kant’s critique is thus stressed.
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Theology and Metaphysics

Hegel commonly claims that the subject matters of philosophy and religion are the same—God. It is not surprisingly, then, that in traditional interpretations Hegel’s idealist metaphysics is often presented (starting with Feuerbach 1983) in an explicitly “theo-centric” manner, in which idealism is identified as a form of “spiritual realism” that treats the material world as the creation or the emanation of an immaterial God who is ultimate reality. But presumably, as argued in Lewis 2011, Hegel’s concept of God should itself be dependent on his metaphysics, and so consequences for Hegel’s metaphysics should be drawn only from his actual theological views, not from commonplace opinions about the nature of God. The relations between Hegel’s metaphysics and his theology can thus be expected to be complex, as emerges in works such as Bubbio 2014, Burbidge 1992, and Williams 2012. The traditional reading of Hegel’s metaphysics might then be questioned on the basis of his theological views, or interpretations of his metaphysics might be drawn upon in expounding his theological views.

Bubbio, Paolo Diego. “God, Incarnation and Metaphysics in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion.” Sophia 53 (2014): 515–533.
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Argues for a recognition-based post-Kantian interpretation of the metaphysics informing Hegel’s conception of God. God’s incarnation is treated as a “kenotic” sacrifice that amounts to a willing renunciation of those attributes traditionally ascribed to God and against which humans are defined negatively.
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Burbidge, John W. Hegel on Logic and Religion: The Reasonableness of Christianity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.
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A collection of essays by a major North American Hegel interpreter who attempts to locate Hegel’s version of Christianity in relation to his logic. A central connecting theme is the necessity given by Hegel to the role of contingency.
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Feuerbach, Ludwig. “Towards a Critique of Hegelian Philosophy.” In The Young Hegelians: An Anthology. Edited by Lawrence S. Stepelevich, 95–128. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
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A classic “young-Hegelian” critique of Hegel’s idealism in which Hegel’s metaphysics is taken to be ultimately some form of spiritual realism. This sets the tone for later “materialist” alternatives to Hegel, importantly, that of Marx.
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Hodgson, Peter C. Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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A clear and reliable overview of Hegel’s theology in relation to his metaphysical views.
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Jaeschke, Walter. Reason in Religion: The Foundations of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion. Translated by J. Michael Stewart and Peter C. Hodgson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
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Translation of Die Vernunft in der Religion: Studien zur Grundlegung der Religionsphilosophie Hegels from 1986 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Germany: Frommann-Holzboog). A thorough investigation of the metaphysical foundations of religious representation as Hegel understands it.
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Lewis, Thomas A. Religion, Modernity and Politics in Hegel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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Contrary to the views of critics, Lewis treats the post-Kantian interpretation adopted as compatible with the centrality of religion for Hegel. For a succinct treatment of this presentation, see also “Beyond the Totalitarian: Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion in Recent Hegel Scholarship,” Religion Compass 2 (2008): 556–574.
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Wallace, Robert M. Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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Links Hegel’s critique of cognitive atomism to his religious views, restoring the centrality of religion to Hegel’s metaphysics. Hegel is construed as a Platonist of an unorthodox stamp.
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Williams, Robert R. Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel & Nietzsche. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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Presents an affirmative reading of Hegel as a philosopher who gives equal weight to philosophy traditionally conceived and religion. While critical of traditional metaphysical interpretations, Williams, who advocates the role of recognition in Hegel’s account of spirit, is critical of the failure of post-Kantian readings to capture Hegel’s central concept of the infinite.
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Hegel and Ancient Metaphysics

Hegel clearly regarded the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle as high points in the history of philosophy, lamented the loss of the constitutive features of this “speculative” approach in modernity, and advocated some sort of reincorporation of this form of thought into modern philosophy. Debates over Hegel’s interpretations of the ancients, as in Ferrarin 2001, Forster 1996, and Gadamer 1976, and his conception of the relation of modern to ancient thought, as in de Laurentiis 2005, clearly bear on the issue of Hegel’s attitudes to Kant’s “critique” of traditional metaphysics.

de Laurentiis, Allegra. Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World: On Hegel’s Theory of Subjectivity. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
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Uses Hegel’s account of the historical differences between ancient and modern modes of thought to illuminate the role of subjectivity in Hegel’s thinking—a concept that Hegel believed to be only systematically realized in the modern world.
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Ferrarin, Allesandro. Hegel and Aristotle. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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Hegel’s interpretation of Aristotle as well as the role played by Aristotle’s metaphysics in relation to Hegel’s own metaphysics is treated in detail.
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Forster, Michael. “Hegel on the Superiority of Ancient over Modern Skepticism.” In Skeptizismus und spekulatives Denken in der Philosophie Hegels. Edited by Hans F. Fulda and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, 64–83. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1996.
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Hegel was critical of modern forms of skepticism, which usually presupposed the unproblematic epistemic access of the individual mind to its own contents. Ancient Pyrrhonism was more attuned to thought’s dialectical dynamic. For a more developed account, see the author’s Hegel and Skepticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
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Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Hegel and the Dialectic of the Ancient Philosophers.” In Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies. By Hans-Georg Gadamer, 5–34. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976.
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Hegel saw Plato and Aristotle as, in their different ways, developing the idea of “dialectic” that had arisen in Greek thought with Zeno and Heraclitus. Gadamer, a major philosopher and philosophical historian of classical thought, focuses on the grounds of Hegel’s readings of Plato and Aristotle. Translated and with an introduction by P. Christopher Smith.
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Halper, Edward C. “Positive and Negative Dialectics: Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik and Plato’s Parmenides.” In Platonismus im Idealismus: Die platonische Tradition in der klassischen deutschen Philosophie. Edited by Burkhard Mojsisch and Orrin F. Summerell, 211–245. Munich: K. G. Saur Verlag, 2003.
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Hegel’s dialectic is clarified by an examination of Hegel’s interpretation of, and attitude to, Plato’s dialectic in the Parmenides. The significance of skepticism for the dialectical development of thought is examined.
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Pinkard, Terry. Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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A development of the author’s earlier post-Kantian reading. The Kantian theme of normativity in human life is developed within a broadly Aristotelian form of naturalism. Hegel is described as following Aristotle with respect to the human goal of being “at home” in the world, but one now “disenchanted.”
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Vieillard-Baron, Jean-Louis. Platon et l’idéalism allemand, 1770–1830. Paris: Beauchesne, 1979.
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Mainly devoted to Hegel’s varying understanding of, and attitude to, Plato and Platonism over the course of his career from his Jena writings to his mature works. Addresses the neglected topic of the revival of Platonistic thought in Germany from the 1790s.
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Hegel and Early Modern Rationalist Metaphysics

When being critical of “metaphysics” it is sometimes clear that Hegel has the early modern rationalist tradition particularly in mind. Hegel’s attitudes to the approaches of Descartes (examined in Pippin 1997, Weiss 1974, and Westphal 2011), Spinoza (examined in Melamed 2010, Moyar 2012, and Parkinson 1977), and Leibniz (examined in Guyer 1979 and Ingram 1985) are important for understanding his own metaphysical position.

Guyer, Paul. “Hegel, Leibniz, and the Contradiction in the Finite.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40 (1979): 75–98.
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As the author points out, Hegel’s relation to Leibniz has (surprisingly) not been subject to much critical attention. Here, Hegel’s attitude to Leibniz is dealt with from the perspective of Hegel’s own metaphysics, which is given a traditional metaphysical interpretation.
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Ingram, David. “Hegel on Leibniz and Individuation.” Kant-Studien: Philosophische Zeitschrift der Kant-Gesellschaft 76 (1985): 420–435.
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Hegel’s critique of nominalism is described in the context of his quasi-Kantian interpretation of Leibniz’s concept of “essence,” in Book 2 of Science of Logic.
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Melamed, Yitzhak Y. “Acosmism or Weak Individuals? Hegel, Spinoza, and the Reality of the Finite.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (2010): 77–92.
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Evaluates Hegel’s critique of Spinoza as representing a form of Parmenidean, or “Eleatic,” monism with no place for individual substances.
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Moyar, Dean. “Thought and Metaphysics: Hegel’s Critical Reception of Spinoza.” In Spinoza and German Idealism. Edited by Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed, 197–213. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
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Hegel’s critique of Spinoza is laid out and assessed in a clear and systematic manner.
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Parkinson, G. H. R. “Hegel, Pantheism, and Spinoza.” Journal of the History of Ideas 38 (1977): 449–459.
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Helpful illumination of Hegel’s metaphysics in relation to that of Spinoza. Discusses the relation of Hegel’s conception of determinate negation to Spinoza’s principle of “all determination is negation” as well as Hegel’s perception of the limitations of Spinoza’s conception of negation.
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Pippin, Robert B. “On Being Anti-Cartesian: Hegel, Heidegger, Subjectivity, and Sociality.” In Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. By Robert B. Pippin, 375–394. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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Rather than examine Hegel’s relation to Descartes directly, Pippin contrasts Hegel’s way of being anti-Cartesian with that of Heidegger (who incorrectly thought of Hegel as being a Cartesian subjectivist).
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Weiss, Frederick G. “Cartesian Doubt and Hegelian Negation.” In Hegel and the History of Philosophy. Edited by Joseph J. O’Malley, K. W. Algozin, and Frederick G. Weiss, 83–94. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974.
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The role played by skepticism in Descartes philosophy must be distinguished from the role played by this type of “negating” thought in Hegel’s. Links to issues of the difference between ancient and modern skepticism for Hegel, and the relation of skeptical to dialectical thought.
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Westphal, Kenneth. “Self-Consciousness, Anti-Cartesianism, and Cognitive Semantics in Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology.” In A Companion to Hegel. Edited by Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 68–90. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
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Portrays Hegel as a powerful critic of the Cartesian attempt to establish knowledge on a basis of the certitude with which a conscious subject is taken as grasping his or her own mental contents.
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Hegel and Kant’s Critique of Metaphysics

While many readers agree on the importance of Hegel’s critique of Kant and the latter’s critique of metaphysics, the consequences for Hegel’s own attitude to metaphysics can be understood differently. Thus different interpreters, in works such as Bristow 2007, Sedgwick 2012, and Stern 1990, may disagree over the degree to which elements of Kant’s critique of metaphysics are maintained in Hegel.

Bristow, William F. Hegel and the Transformation of Philosophical Critique. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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Focuses on Hegel as transforming Kant’s notion of “critique.” A work broadly supportive of the post-Kantian reading of Hegel introduced by Pippin.
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Henrich, Dieter, ed. Kant oder Hegel: Über Formen der Begründung in der Philosophie. Papers presented at the Stuttgarter Hegel-Kongress held under the auspices of the Internationale Vereinigung zur Förderung der Hegelschen Philosophie and the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Stuttgart, Germany, 1981. Stuttgart: Verlag Klett-Cotta, 1983.
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Proceedings of the International Hegel Congress of 1981. The papers in this volume, mostly in German, are focused on a comparison and contrast between Kant’s deductive and Hegel’s dialectical methods. Some of the papers take up the theme of the relation of both methods to contemporary approaches in analytic philosophy.
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Kreines, James. “Between the Bounds of Experience and Divine Intuition: Kant’s Epistemic Limits and Hegel’s Ambitions.” Inquiry 50.3 (2007): 306–334.
DOI: 10.1080/00201740701356253Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A defense of Hegel in the context of a Kantian critique (like that in Longuenesse 2007) that Hegel attributes God-like epistemic powers to humans in his conception of metaphysics.
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Longuenesse, Béatrice. “Point of View of Man or Knowledge of God: Kant and Hegel on Concept, Judgment, and Reason.” In Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics. By Béatrice Longuenesse, 165–191. Translated by Nicole J. Simek. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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An essay in which the author modifies her earlier endorsement of Hegel’s critique of Kant (see Longuenesse 2007, cited under Logic and Metaphysics). Here elements of a Kantian counter-critique are taken up critical of the theological dimensions of Hegel’s implicit epistemology.
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McCumber, John. Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.
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The topic is approached from the perspective of the author’s interpretation of Hegel as a type of linguistic idealist—a position developed in the author’s earlier, The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993).
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Priest, Stephen, ed. Hegel’s Critique of Kant. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
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A useful collection of articles on Hegel’s criticisms of Kant that range over different dimensions of their respective philosophies.
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Sedgwick, Sally. Hegel’s Critique of Kant: From Dichotomy to Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199698363.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A lucid and compelling account of Hegel’s philosophy as developed from a critique of those features of Kant that had led transcendental idealism into a dualistic skepticism.
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Stern, Robert. Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object. London: Routledge, 1990.
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An earlier work by a leading advocate of a revised metaphysical reading of Hegel, portraying Hegel’s philosophy in terms of his critique of Kant’s transcendental idealism.
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Hegel and the Metaphysics of Theoretical Cognition

Hegel’s complex philosophy of mind is meant both to give a unified account of mind’s theoretical and practical activities and to relate the contents of individual subjective minds to “objective” mind or spirit (Geist) qua historically changeable patterns of social and intersubjective activities and the institutions that give these interactions stability over time. With exceptions, such as DeVries 1988 and Wolff 1992, Hegel’s account of the mind’s theoretical activities in particular has been, until recently, relatively neglected. Hegel’s account of recognition has, however, come to be seen as particularly significant in this context, as in Brandom 2007 and Ikäheimo and Laitinen 2011.

Brandom, Robert. “The Structure of Desire and Recognition: Self-Consciousness and Self-Constitution.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (2007): 127–150.
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An interpretation of Hegel’s “recognitive” approach to self-consciousness and intentionality by a leading analytic philosopher. Hegel’s notion of recognition is linked to his own “inferentialist” semantic theory based in the work of Wilfrid Sellars. Reprinted in Ikäheimo and Laitinen 2011.
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DeVries, Willem. Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity: An Introduction to Theoretical Spirit. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
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A rare systematic engagement with Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit. Displaying an approach influenced by the philosophy of American analytic philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, this work is also important within the context of the recent engagement with Hegel by analytic philosophers.
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Ikäheimo, Heikki, and Arto Laitinen, eds. Recognition and Social Ontology. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2011.
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A volume of essays focusing on the links between the recognitive account of self-consciousness and the social ontology that is presupposed. Essays by Brandom, Pippin, Siep, Ikäheimo, and Redding focus on the dynamics of recognition in Hegel.
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Inwood, Michael. “Commentary.” In Philosophy of Mind. By G. W. F. Hegel, 279–664. Oxford: Clarendon, 2007.
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Inwood’s careful commentary is an invaluable resource for research into Hegel’s approach to mind or spirit (Geist), especially the doctrine of subjective spirit (subsections Anthropology, Phenomenology of Mind, Psychology), as presented in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. Translated from the 1830 edition together with Zusätze by W. Wallace and A. V. Miller. Revised with introduction (pp. ix–xxvii) and commentary by M. J. Inwood.
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Stern, David. Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit: Imaginative Transformation and Ethical Action in Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013.
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A helpful collection of essays covering a wide range of topics in relation to this relatively neglected area of Hegel commentary.
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Wolff, Michael. Das Körper–Seele Problem: Kommentar zu Hegel Enzyklopädie, 1830, §389. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1992.
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Important work on Hegel’s conception of the mind-body problem by a leading German Hegel interpreter. Wolff undertakes a careful unpacking of sections of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (subsection, Anthropology) and contrasts Hegel’s approach with the approaches of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.
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Hegel and the Metaphysics of Practical Cognition

In both Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right, mind or spirit (Geist) is treated as constituted in acts of mutual recognition between human subjects. Although this “recognitive” approach to cognition should presumably be relevant to the constitution of the intentional contents of both theoretical and practical cognition, up until recently this approach has been studied in relation to the latter, Honneth 1995, in particular, being influential. Important parallels with analytic approaches to agency have emerged in Quante 2004 and Yeomans 2012.

Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by J. Anderson. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995.
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Honneth, a critical social theorist in the tradition of Habermas, develops a Hegel-based approach to recognition and intersubjectivity. Influential in the development of a Hegel-influenced “theory of recognition.” English translation of the author’s Kampf um Anerkennung: Zur moralischen Grammatik sozialer Konflikte from 1992 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp).
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Laitinen, Arto, and Constantine Sandis, eds. Hegel on Action. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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An excellent collection with many penetrating essays by leading Hegel scholars. Links are made to analogous approaches to action in recent analytic philosophy.
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Pippin. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511808005Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Construes Hegel’s practical philosophy as a social theory of agency in which recognition by others plays an essential role in the constitution of the very contents of an individual’s actions. A development of the author’s post-Kantian interpretation that first appeared in Pippin 1989 (cited under Synoptic and Comprehensive Interpretations of Hegel’s Metaphysics).
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Quante, Michael. Hegel’s Concept of Action. Translated by Dean Moyar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511498299Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
English translation of the author’s Hegels Begriff der Handlung (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann, 1993). Groundbreaking early attempt to establish connections between Hegel’s approach to agency and recent approaches in the analytic tradition, such as those of Anscombe and Davidson.
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Williams, Robert R. Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
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A leading theorist of Hegel’s “recognitive” approach to self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. Focuses mainly on the role of recognition in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
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Yeomans, Christopher. Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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A detailed investigation of the metaphysics of agency and free will in Hegel, understood in relation to the Science of Logic. Critical of the limitations of the broadly “expressivist” readings of Hegel’s approach to agency found in the post-Kantian readings, such as those of Pippin.
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Hegel and the Sciences

The question of the commitments of idealism are tightly tied to the question of an idealist attitude to the (nonphilosophical) sciences. From shortly after his death, especially with the strongly positivistic turn in thought about the sciences in Germany in the 1840s, Hegel’s philosophy of nature was, along with Schellingian and romantic counterparts, largely dismissed as a priori speculation that ignored actual scientific investigations. More sympathetic treatments, as in Houlgate 1998 and Petry 1993, have developed since the 1960s, especially in relation to Hegel’s treatment of the organic world, as found in Ferrini 2011 and Kreines 2008.

Cohen, Robert S., and Marx W. Wartofsky, eds. Hegel and the Sciences. Papers presented at a symposium sponsored by the Hegel Society of America and the Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston, 1970. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 64. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1984.
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A collection resulting from a conference held in 1970, early in the Hegel revival. While remnants of existing positivist reactions against Hegel are included, the collection covers Hegel’s treatment of the natural sciences over a range of areas with interpretations sympathetic to Hegel’s treatment of the sciences of his time.
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Ferrini, Cinzia. “The Transition to Organics: Hegel’s Idea of Life.” In A Companion to Hegel. Edited by Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 203–224. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
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Hegel’s treatment of life, and of the passage from inorganic to organic processes, cannot be understood in naturalistic or vitalistic terms. The dynamic of division and reintegration seen in the organic world parallels the processes involved in conceptual thinking itself.
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Houlgate, Stephen, ed. Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
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A wide-ranging series of articles that cover Hegel’s treatment of particular sciences from mathematics to biology.
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Kreines, James. “The Logic of Life: Hegel’s Philosophical Defense of Teleological Explanation of Living Beings.” In Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. Edited by Frederic C. Beiser, 344–377. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9780521831673Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A careful comparison of Kant’s and Hegel’s respective understandings of teleology, the basis of Kant’s skepticism and Hegel’s response. The arguments of both Kant and Hegel on this issue have contemporary relevance to the ongoing debate over the role of teleology in biology.
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Larvor, Brendan. “Lakatos’s Mathematical Hegelianism.” The Owl of Minerva 31 (1999): 23–44.
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Argues that the approach of major 20th-century Hungarian philosopher of mathematics Imre Lakatos, whose approach is usually associated with that of the Popperian school, was in fact based on Hegel’s dialectic.
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Petry, Michael John, ed. Hegel and Newtonianism. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1993.
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It had long been assumed that Hegel’s thought was the antithesis of Newton’s thought. The appearance of this collection marked a change in the traditional attitude with the growing realization that Hegel’s philosophy of nature was not meant to be critical of, or replace, natural science, but rather presupposed it.
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Posch, Thomas. “Hegel and the Sciences.” In A Companion to Hegel. Edited by Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 177–202. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
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A clear systematic treatment of Hegel’s approaches to the sciences from “mechanics” to “organics” with an overview of the historical reception of Hegel’s philosophy of nature.
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Westphal, Kenneth. “Philosophizing about Nature: Hegel’s Philosophical Project.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hegel & Nineteenth Century Philosophy. Edited by Frederick C. Beiser, 281–310. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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Westphal is a leading revisionist metaphysical interpreter of Hegel. Here he argues for a sympathetic account of Hegel’s critical relation to Newton. In his philosophy of nature Hegel had incorporated Newton’s gravitational theory within a philosophically coherent account of the role of laws in scientific explanation.
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Early Analytic Philosophical Critiques of Hegel’s Metaphysics

Many British philosophers at the end of the 19th century had been favorably disposed toward Hegel. As argued in Redding 2007 and Rockmore 2005, this attitude was eroded by the ascendency of what became known as “analytic” philosophy. While the founders of analysis—Bertrand Russell (Russell 2008) and G. E. Moore—had opposed their approach to the analysis of concepts to what was regarded as the “synthetic” approaches of their Hegelian teachers, the effectiveness of these arguments have been challenged in Horstmann 1984 and Westphal 2010.

Horstmann, Rolf-Peter. Ontologie und Relationen. Königstein, Germany: Athenäum-Hain, 1984.
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A careful and systematic critique by a leading German Hegel scholar of Russell’s early analytic portrayal of Hegel as a theorist of “internal relations.”
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Hylton, Peter. “Hegel and Analytic Philosophy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Edited by Frederick C. Beiser, 445–483. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL0521382742Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A clear and comprehensive account of the context of the turn of Russell and Moore against Hegel and idealism in Great Britain at the end of the 19th century.
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Redding, Paul. “Introduction: Analytic Philosophy and the Fall and Rise of the Kant–Hegel Tradition.” In Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought. By Paul Redding, 1–20. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
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Traces the collapse of the Kant–Hegel tradition under the influence of the deployment of formal logic in early analytic philosophy.
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Rockmore, Tom. Hegel, Idealism, and Analytic Philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
DOI: 10.12987/yale/9780300104509.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Combines a history of the early analytic misunderstandings of idealism with a critique of the way that Hegel is understood within recent analytic philosophers, such as Brandom and McDowell, who construe Hegel in a favorable light.
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Russell, Bertrand. “Hegel.” In History of Western Philosophy. By Bertrand Russell, 661–674. London: Routledge, 2008.
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A widely influential account of Hegel in Russell’s popular history, first published in 1945 and still in print. Hegel’s metaphysics portrayed as based on an outdated assumption from traditional logic. Many, perhaps most, of Russell’s interpretations of Hegel are now rejected by Hegel scholars.
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Westphal, Kenneth. “Hegel, Russell, and the Foundations of Philosophy.” In Hegel and the Analytic Tradition. Edited by Angelica Nuzzo, 173–193. London: Continuum, 2010.
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A penetrating critique of Bertrand Russell’s dismissal of Hegel’s account on the basis of an alleged conflation of the “is” of predication and the “is” of identity. On Westphal’s view, Hegel has turned out to be a much more percipient critic of Russell’s own account of “knowledge by acquaintance.”
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Hegel’s Metaphysics in Relation to Recent Analytic Philosophy

Since the 1980s the antagonism of analytic philosophers to Hegel has to some degree weakened, and some favorable construals by leading figures, such as Robert Brandom (Brandom 2002) and John McDowell (McDowell 2003), have appeared. For the most part, Hegel has been broadly construed as a pragmatist, as in Rorty 1994—a move that in some ways fits with the Hegelian features of the thought of classical American pragmatist John Dewey. This approach characteristically plays down the metaphysical dimensions of Hegel’s thought.

Brandom, Robert B. Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
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Brandom is a major analytic philosopher known predominantly for his “inferentialist” account of semantics influenced by the work of Wilfrid Sellars. Brandom portrays Hegel as a post-Kantian with an analogous inferentialist approach to the contents of thought.
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Brandom, Robert B. A Spirit of Trust: A Semantic Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 2014.
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Although yet to be published, various incarnations of this work, which presents Brandom’s developed reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit from the perspective of his inferentialist theory of semantics, have been available in a series of electronic incarnations for a number of years, attracting considerable secondary discussion.
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McCumber, John. “Hegel and Natural Language.” In Hegel and the Analytic Tradition. Edited by Angelica Nuzzo, 83–95. London: Continuum, 2010.
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McCumber compares Hegel’s approach to the relation of language to thought to some contemporary movements in analytic philosophy. The interpretation of Hegel as a “linguistic idealist” is presented in the author’s more comprehensive study, The Company of Words: Hegel, Language and Systematic Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993).
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McDowell, John. H. “The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of ‘Lordship and Bondage’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology.” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 47 (2003): 1–16.
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A generally post-Kantian reading of Hegel from a major analytic philosopher, who, in Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), suggested that Hegel could be understood without the extravagant metaphysical commitments usually attributed to him. Republished in Hegel: New Directions, edited by Katerina Deligiorgi (Chesham, UK: Acumen, 2006), pp. 33–48.
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Nuzzo, Angelica., ed. Hegel and the Analytic Tradition. London: Continuum, 1010.
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A helpful collection of essays from various perspectives on the relation between Hegel’s idealism and the approaches of analytic philosophers.
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Redding. “Hegel and Analytic Philosophy.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel. Edited by Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards, 313–319. London: Continuum, 2013.
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An examination of the parallels between approaches to metaphysics by analytic philosophers John McDowell and Robert Brandom and Hegel’s own metaphysics.
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Rorty, Richard. “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin.” In Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870–1930. Edited by Dorothy Ross, 54–68. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
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While not a systematic interpreter of Hegel, Rorty has been influential in his Dewey-inspired presentation of Hegel as a critic of the “foundationalist” and “representationalist” stances of metaphysics. A central figure in the development of the “pragmatist” reading of Hegel as found in Brandom 2002 and McDowell 2003. Reprinted in Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 290–306.
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Stekeler-Weithofer, Pirmin. Hegels analytische Philosophie: Die Wissenschaft der Logik als kritische Theorie der Bedeutung. Paderborn, Germany: Schoningh, 1992.
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A work by a German scholar adopting a semantics-based approach to Hegel’s philosophy that converges with developments within anglophone “analytic” approaches to Hegel.
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Hegel’s Metaphysics from the Perspective of Continental European Philosophy

While the revival of Hegelian thought that had taken place across Continental Europe in the later 19th century had affected philosophy as practiced in Great Britain, Hegelianism, as surveyed in Keenan 2004, came to play a greater role in Continental European thought than it did in Britain into the 20th century. Despite being critical of many aspects of what was taken to be Hegel’s metaphysics, European philosophers throughout the 20th century, in works such as Lukács 1977 and Habermas 1987, displayed a generally positive attitude to Hegel. More generally, the “phenomenological” dimensions of continental thought, as charted in Herzog 2013, McCumber 2014, and Nuzzo 1998, have made it more receptive to Hegelianism than has been analytic philosophy.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1987.
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Translation of Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen first published in 1985 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). An influential account of the development of the enlightenment project of philosophy from the opposing positions of Hegel and Nietzsche by a leading critical theorist.
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Herzog, Liza, ed. Hegel’s Thought in Europe: Currents, Crosscurrents, and Undercurrents. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137309228Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A valuable coverage of Hegelian movements of thought from Russia to Great Britain.
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Keenan, Dennis King. Hegel and Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.
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A collection of extracts from important philosophers from the “continental” tradition who have taken up and developed key ideas from Hegel.
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Löwith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought. Reprint. Columbia University Press, 1991.
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Originally published in 1964. Translation of Löwith’s Von Hegel zu Nietzsche: Der revolutionäre Bruch im Denken des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer), a classic work from 1941 charting 19th-century reactions to Hegel within the European context from the young Hegelians to later existentialists.
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Lukács, György. The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1977.
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Translation of a politically engaged interpretation first published in the 1940s and portraying the young Hegel in relation to the later views of Marx. Important in the development of Hegelian Marxism in the 20th century.
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McCumber, John. Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought. Durham, UK: Acumen, 2014.
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Hegel is located within a historicist approach to philosophy that locates it in time and rejects the atemporal, Platonic approach characteristic of the forms of metaphysics that stem from Plato.
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Nuzzo, Angelica. “An Outline of Italian Hegelianism, 1832–1988.” The Owl of Minerva 29 (1998): 165–205.
DOI: 10.5840/owl19982921Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In Italy philosophy was to become perhaps more Hegelian in the early decades of the 20th century than in any other European country. The major figures and movements are here surveyed.
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Hegel’s Metaphysics from the Perspective of French Philosophy

The reception of Hegel in France in the 20th century displays features that warrant separate treatment. In the second third of the century Hegel underwent a revival in France, especially because of the influence of Kojève 1969 and Hyppolite 1979. Works such as Gutting 2010, Hoy 1991, and Lumsden 2014 trace and assess how this initial embrace of Hegel, read to a degree through the spectacles of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, was followed by a reaction in which structuralist and post-structuralist ideas were used to criticize the purported subjectivity of Hegelianism.

Barnett, Stuart, ed. Hegel after Derrida. London: Routledge, 1998.
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A collection examining the status of Hegelian thought in the light of Derrida’s project of the deconstruction of metaphysics.
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Butler, Judith P. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
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An influential account of the French attitudes to Hegel and the role of desire and recognition in his philosophy. Butler advocates “Nietzschean” ways of getting beyond problems in Hegel that, however, are premised on the traditional metaphysical reading of Hegel.
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Gutting, Gary. “Foucault, Hegel and Philosophy.” In Foucault and Philosophy. Edited by Christopher Falzon and Timothy O’Leary, 17–35. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
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Foucault is usually described as having broken radically with an earlier, more Hegel-friendly, generation of French philosophers. The author focuses on the history of this change and the interpretation of Hegel assumed by the earlier generation and reacted against by the later.
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Hoy, David Cousins. “A History of Consciousness: From Kant and Hegel to Derrida and Foucault.” History of the Human Sciences 4.2 (1991): 261–281.
DOI: 10.1177/095269519100400204Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A helpful synoptic account of the role of Hegel in developing attitudes to consciousness within the European tradition.
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Hyppolite, Jean. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1979.
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English translation of Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de l’esprit de Hegel, first published in French in 1946 (Paris: Aubier). Hyppolite’s interpretation draws on Husserlian and Heideggerian ideas, resulting in a weakening of the metaphysical features of Hegelian thought. This work influenced a generation of later thinkers.
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Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Assembled by Raymond Queneau. Edited by Allan Bloom. Translated by James H. Nichols Jr. New York: Basic Books, 1969.
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Partial translation of Introduction à la lecture de Hegel first published in 1947 (Paris: Gallimard). Hegel’s account of the “master-slave” dialectic presented in a way that draws attention to parallels with Marx and Heidegger. For many years this work provided a picture of Hegel that was widely influential in “continental” philosophy. More recent accounts of Hegel on recognition (e.g., Williams 1997) have often been critical of Kojève’s interpretation.
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Lumsden, Simon. Self-Consciousness and the Critique of the Subject: Hegel, Heidegger and the Post-structuralists. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
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Focuses on the implicit interpretation of Hegel that underlies many of the post-structuralist critiques of Hegel since the second half of the 20th century. It is argues that these all assume the traditional reading of Hegel and do not consider the post-Kantian alternative.
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Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
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The author, a philosopher who works within both Hegelian and Derridean paradigms, links Hegel’s dialectic to what are taken to be subsequent transformations of it—Heidegger’s “destruction” and Derrida’s “deconstruction” of metaphysics. Translated with an introduction by Carolyn Shread, with a new afterword by the author and a foreword by Clayton Crocker.
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