This book shows how an understanding of the nature and role of insanity in Hegel's writing provides intriguing new points of access to many of the central themes of his larger philosophic project. Berthold-Bond situates Hegel's theory of madness within the history of psychiatric practice during the great reform period at the turn of the eighteenth century, and shows how Hegel developed a middle path between the stridently opposed camps of "empirical" and "romantic" medicine, and of "somatic" and "psychical" practitioners. A key point of the book is to show that Hegel does not conceive of madness and health as strictly opposing states, but as kindred phenomena sharing many of the same underlying mental structures and strategies, so that the ontologies of insanity and rationality involve a mutually illuminating, mirroring relation. Hegel's theory is tested against the critiques of the institution of psychiatry and the very concept of madness by such influential twentieth-century authors as Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, and defended as offering a genuinely reconciling position in the contemporary debate between the "social labeling" and "medical" models of mental illness.

The best introduction for the general reader to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

Hegel is presented as a critical philosopher whose disagreements with Kant only enhance the idealist arguments against empiricism, realism and naturalism in this original interpretation.

A two-volume set. Print edition available in cloth only. Awarded the Nicholas Hoare/Renaud-Bray Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize, 2001 From the Preface: Hegel's Ladder aspires to be . . . a ‘literal commentary’ on Die Phänomenologie des Geistes. . . . It was the conscious goal of my thirty-year struggle with Hegel to write an explanatory commentary on this book; and with its completion I regard my own ‘working’ career as concluded. . . . The prevailing habit of commentators . . . is founded on the general consensus of opinion that whatever else it may be, Hegel’s Phenomenology is not the logical ‘Science’ that he believed it was. This is the received view that I want to overthrow. But if I am right, then an acceptably continuous chain of argument, paragraph by paragraph, ought to be discoverable in the text.

An advance on recent revisionist thinking about Hegelian philosophy, this book interprets Hegel's achievement as part of a revolutionary modernization of ancient philosophical thought initiated by Kant.

Hegel's Transcendental Induction challenges the orthodox account of Hegelian phenomenology as a hyper-rationalism, arguing that Hegel's insistence on the primacy of experience in the development of scientific knowledge amounts to a kind of empiricism, or inductive epistemology. While the inductive element does not exclude an emphasis on deductive demonstration as well, Hegel's phenomenological description of knowledge demonstrates why knowing becomes scientific only to the extent that it recognizes its dependence on experience. Simpson's argument closely parallels Hegel's own in the Phenomenology of Spirit, highlighting those sections, like Hegel's analysis of mastery and slavery, that contribute to the argument that knowing is both vulnerable and responsive to the way in which experience resists our attempts to make sense of things. Simpson's argument connects his account of Hegelian phenomenology with traditional accounts of induction, and with a number of other commentators. "The central thesis about the inductive development of the Phenomenology is worked out with care. This thesis allows the author to present fresh and often compelling re-readings of such often commented on themes as the natural consciousness, desire, slavery, morality, and forgiveness. Since Hegel himself does not describe his method in terms of induction, this book suggests a truly interesting shift of perspective on the Phenomenology". -- Daniel Berthold-Bond, Bard College

Presents a methodological basis for a philosophy of concrete actuality. Also breaks new ground in its mediation between two varied traditions of speculative philosophy.

How Hegel proves the truth of logic by examining the dynamics of lived experience.

Few philosophers can induce as much puzzlement among students as Hegel. His works are notoriously dense and make very few concessions for a readership unfamiliar with his systematic view of the world. Allen Speight's introduction to Hegel's philosophy takes a chronological perspective on the development of Hegel's system. In this way, some of the most important questions in Hegelian scholarship are illuminated by examining in their respective contexts works such as the "Phenomenology and the Logic". Speight begins with the young Hegel and his writings prior to the "Phenomenology" focusing on the notion of positivity and how Hegel's social, economic and religious concerns became linked to systematic and logical ones. He then examines the "Phenomenology" in detail, including its treatment of scepticism, the problem of immediacy, the transition from "consciousness" to "self-consciousness", and the emergence of the social and historical category of "Spirit". The following chapter explores the Logic, paying particular attention to a number of vexed issues associated with Hegel's claims to systematicity and the relation between the categories of Hegel's logic and nature or spirit (Geist). The final chapters discuss Hegel's ethical and political thought and the three elements of his notion of "absolute spirit": art, religion and philosophy, as well as the importance of history to his philosophical approach as a whole.

Investigates the role of family in Hegel’s phenomenology.