Hegel: Foundations

Seven dialogues into the thought of G. W. F. Hegel

A course on the thought of G. W. F. Hegel.

What you will learn

Place Hegel's life and the Phenomenology in the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon
Grasp the founding conviction: philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought
Understand the two ideals the age could not unite: radical freedom and expressive wholeness
See why Hegel insists the cure must come through reason, not by retreating from it
Follow the being-nothing-becoming derivation step by step
Grasp Aufhebung and determinate negation; discard the thesis-antithesis-synthesis caricature
Reconstruct the recognition argument: desire → struggle → mastery and servitude → the reversal through fear and work
Explain why recognition must be mutual to be worth anything

The World-Soul on Horseback — Jena, October 1806: Napoleon rides beneath my window while the Phenomenology's last pages sit in my coat. Who I am, where I came from, and why philosophy must comprehend its own time.
The Age Torn in Half — The wound my philosophy answers: Kant's gap, the Enlightenment's crisis of reason, the longing for Greece, and a freedom that uproots everything it touches.
The Dialectic: Thinking Without a Parachute — The method itself: begin with nothing presupposed, watch pure being turn into nothing and both into becoming — and learn why contradiction is an engine, not an error.
Master and Slave — Desire, the struggle to the death, and the great reversal: why the master's victory is hollow and the slave's labor is the road to freedom.
Geist: The I That Is a We — Spirit is not a ghost. What I mean by Geist: the shared life of mutually recognizing selves — language, customs, institutions — the element you have breathed since birth.
Freedom's Architecture — and the Terror — The Philosophy of Right: why doing-as-you-please is not yet freedom; family, civil society, and state as freedom made actual — and the Revolution's descent into Terror as the proof by catastrophe.
Reason in History — and the Owl at Dusk — World history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom: the slaughter-bench, the cunning of reason, the world-historical individuals — and the racist pages of my own lectures, read without…

Phenomenology of Spirit — My 1807 'voyage of discovery' — consciousness educated, shape by shape, from bare sense-certainty to absolute knowing; finished the night before the battle of Jena.
Science of Logic — The system's foundation (1812-16) — pure thought deriving its own categories from a beginning with nothing presupposed.
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences — My complete system in outline (1817; revised 1827, 1830): logic, nature, spirit.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right — My political philosophy (1821) — freedom made actual in right, morality, and ethical life.
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History — The Berlin lectures (1822-31) — world history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy — My first publication (1801) — where I name division the source of the need of philosophy.
Lectures on Aesthetics — The Berlin lectures on art — beauty as the sensuous shining of the Idea, and art's highest vocation as something past.
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion — The Berlin lectures — religion and philosophy share one content; religion holds it in images, philosophy in concepts.

dialectic, Aufhebung, Geist, Sittlichkeit, recognition, cunning of reason

Part of the Simposeum course library.