Hegel’s Odyssey

Geoffrey Hawthorn

  • Hegel: The Letters translated by Clark Butler and Christine Seiler
    Indiana, 740 pp, $47.50, January 1985, ISBN 0 253 32715 6

Ottilie von Goethe recalled a lunch in Weimar in October 1827. Her father-in-law, as usual, had not bothered with the introductions.

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[*] See Robert Solomon’s In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G.W.F. Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, Oxford, New York, 646 pp., £25, 22 December 1983, 0 19 5013169 5. Michael Rosen’s more formal and admirably concise analysis of Hegel’s method, one of whose virtues is a review of the assessments that others have made of that method, one of whose arguments is that the method can’t be divorced from the content, and whose conclusion is that the method is untenable, has recently been reissued in paperback: Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism (Cambridge, 190 pp., £.6.95, 31 January, 0 521 31860 2).

[†] All existing editions of Hegel’s lectures have for understandable reasons conflated his own notes and those taken by his students (including in Berlin his son Karl), which were often written up and sold to others, and which Hegel himself sometimes bought to see what he’d managed to convey. But his conscientiousness in continually revising what he said is now revealed in a new edition of the lectures he gave in 1821, 1824, 1827 and 1831 on the then new subject of the philosophy of religion: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, edited by Peter Hodgson, Vol. I: Introduction and Concept of Religion, University of California Press, 494 pp., £.35.40, September 1984, 0 520 04676 5. Two more volumes are to follow.