The Cambridge Companion to Hegel

Few thinkers are more controversial in the history of philosophy than Hegel. He has been dismissed as a charlatan and obscurantist, but also praised as one of the greatest thinkers in modern philosophy. No one interested in philosophy can afford to ignore him. This volume considers all the major aspects of Hegel’s work: epistemology, logic, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion. Special attention is devoted to problems in the interpretation of Hegel: the unity of the Phenomenology of Spirit; the value of the dialectical method; the status of his logic; the nature of his politics. A final group of chapters treats Hegel’s complex historical legacy: the development of Hegelianism and its growth into a left and right wing school; the relation of Hegel and Marx; and the subtle connections between Hegel and contemporary analytic philosophy.

Table of Contents

1. Hegel’s intellectual development to 1807
2. You Can’t Get There from Here: Transition problems in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
3. Hegel’s conception of logic
4. Hegel’s idealism: The logic of conceptuality
5. Hegel’s dialectical method
6. Thought and being: Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theoretical philosophy
7. Hegel’s ethics
8. The basic context and structure of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
9. Hegel’s historicism 
10. Hegel on religion and philosophy 
11. Hegel’s aesthetics: An overview 
12. Transformations of Hegelianism, 1805-1846 
13. Hegel and Marxism 
14. Hegel and analytic philosophy 

About the author

Frederick Charles Beiser is an American philosopher who is professor of philosophy at Syracuse University. He is one of the leading English-language scholars of German idealism. In addition to his writings on German idealism, Beiser has also written on the German Romantics and 19th-century British philosophy.