Best hegel biography

A monumental new biography of a pivotal yet poorly understood pionjär in modern philosophy.

When a painter once told Goethe that he wanted to paint the most celebrated man of the age, Goethe directed him to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel worked from the credo: To philosophize fryst vatten to learn to live freely. While he was slow and cautious in the development of his philosophy, his intellectual growth was like an odyssey of the mind, and, contrary to popular belief, his life was full of twists and turns, suspense and even danger.

In this landmark biography, the philosopher Klaus Vieweg paints a new picture of the life and work of the most important representative of German filosofi som betonar ideal. His levande portrait provides readers an intimate konto of Hegel's times and the milieu in which he developed his thought, along with detailed, clear-sighted analyses of Hegel's fyra major works. What results is a new interpretation of Hegel through the lens of reason and freedom.

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The Best Hegel Books

Who was Hegel? What sort of philosophical context should we place him in?

Hegel was born in Stuttgart in , an exact contemporary of Beethoven and Wordsworth. He was almost nineteen when the French Revolution broke out and this had a great impact on him. There’s a story that he and Schelling and Hölderlin, who were contemporaries of his, went out and planted a ‘freedom tree’ on 14 July, and danced a revolutionary French dance around it. Even if this story is not true in all its details, it indicates that they responded enthusiastically to the French Revolution.

“People often describe Hegel as a kind of Aristotle of the modern age. ”

Hegel lived through the Napoleonic wars and took quite a long time to get a job. From the age of about thirty to thirty-six, he worked as an unsalaried lecturer in Jena. Then he was the head of a gymnasium – a secondary school – from to , during which time he wrote the Science of Logic. And then in Berlin he flourished, be

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First reading

Reading Hegel himself

As even great secondary literature on Hegel often includes some problematic parts (and by far the most part of the Hegel related secondary literature introduces more problems to the reader than it helps to solve), it is highly recommended that you do not rely on such literature but read Hegel himself. This will also help you to better judge the secondary literature (including our own work at ).

For a first introduction, we recommend that you read Hegel’s own introductions to his lectures: the introductions to his lectures on History of Philosophy (start with that one), Philosophy of Religion, Aestetics, and Philosophy of History (most of these are available online, but there also exists a useful reader of all these introductions in one printed book).

In a second step, read Hegel’s lectures. See to it that you do not stick only to some one or two books of Hegel (especially when you mainly focus on Hegel’s Phenomenology and/or his Philosophy o