Hegel: Scholar

Six dialogues on the wars over my corpse

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

What you will learn

State the metaphysical (Beiser), non-metaphysical (Pippin), and cosmic-spirit (Taylor) readings precisely, each at full strength
Locate the textual cruxes the dispute turns on and what each side must explain away
Distinguish what Kojève amplified in my text from what he invented, and reconstruct his end-of-history doctrine precisely
State Honneth's alternative: the young-Hegel struggle as moral grammar — and where it corrects Kojève
Trace the two documented inheritances: the philosophical anthropology and the three-stage shape of history
State the inversion thesis from its actual locus and assess Chitty's verdict that it is 'too simple'
State each revolt's core objection precisely and in its strongest form
Mount Hegel's best replies — and identify where each revolt lands a wound the replies do not close

What Kind of Idealist? The Dispute Over the Corpse — The deepest war in Hegel scholarship: is the system an immanent metaphysics of the Absolute, the completion of Kant's critical project, or a vision of cosmic spirit that fails at its proof? Three…
The Master-Slave's Afterlife: Paris, 1933 — Eleven paragraphs of the Phenomenology become the twentieth century's myth: Kojève's seminar, the end of history, the most influential footnote in modern philosophy — and Honneth's rival renewal of…
Standing On Its Head: Hegel and Marx — The inheritance Marx denied: species-being from my Geist, history's shape from my Roman world, estrangement from my own vocabulary — and why his famous inversion story misdescribes his own debt.
The Revolts: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Adorno — Three great refusals of the system: the existing individual no science can swallow, the nothing I allegedly never questioned, and the negative dialectic that keeps my engine and breaks my closure.
The Ruling Categories of the World: The Indictment — Bernasconi's case in full: the corrupted editions, the theodicy's architecture, the racial exclusions documented — and the question no internal defense settles: did the system invite the crime?
Hegel Now: The Gravediggers' Language — The resurrection: how analytic philosophy buried me and its own children brought me back — Sellars to McDowell and Brandom — with Derrida's interminable debt, Malabou's plasticity, Taylor's situated…

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 editions are themselves a scholarly battleground.
System of Ethical Life — My 1802-03 Jena manuscript — where the struggle for recognition first drives ethical life; Honneth's favorite text.
Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit — The 1805-06 Realphilosophie — labor, language, love, and recognition before the Phenomenology froze them into shapes.
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion — The Berlin lectures — religion and philosophy share one content; the estate my left and right heirs fought over first.

reception, non-metaphysical reading, end of history, recognition theory, the nonidentical, plasticity

Part of the Simposeum course library.