This book is an exploration of the relevance of Hegel's thought to contemporary society and politics.

This book relates Hegel to later philosophers and philosophies.

Debates over the 'end of art' have tended to obscure Hegel's work on the arts themselves. Benjamin Rutter opens this study with a defence of art's indispensability to Hegel's conception of modernity; he then seeks to reorient discussion toward the distinctive values of painting, poetry, and the novel. Working carefully through Hegel's four lecture series on aesthetics, he identifies the expressive possibilities particular to each medium. Thus, Dutch genre scenes animate the everyday with an appearance of vitality; metaphor frees language from prose; and Goethe's lyrics revive the banal routines of love with imagination and wit. Rutter's important study reconstructs Hegel's view not only of modern art but of modern life and will appeal to philosophers, literary theorists, and art historians alike.

DIVTranslated into English for the first time, this work portrays a different side of Hegel -- not just as a philosopher preoccupied with abstract ideas but a man deeply enmeshed and active in the pressing, concrete political issues of his time./div

Hegel, more than any other modern Western philosopher, produced the most systematic case for the superiority of Western white Protestant bourgeois modernity. He established a racially structured ladder of gradation of the peoples of the world, putting Germanic people at the top of the racial pyramid, people of Asia in the middle, and Africans and Indigenous people of the Americas and Pacific Islands at the bottom. In Hegel and the Third World Tibebu guides the reader through Hegel’s presentation on universalism to argue that such a classification flows in part from Hegel's philosophy of the development of human consciousness. Hegel classified Africans as people arrested at the lowest and most immediate stage of consciousness, that of the senses; Asians as people with divided consciousness, that of the understanding; and Europeans as people of reason. Tibebu demonstrates that Hegel’s views were not his alone but reflected the fundamental beliefs of other major figures of Western thought at the time. With detailed analysis and thorough research Hegel and the Third World challenges the central idea of Hegel's philosophy of history: progress. In addition, Tibebu succeeds in providing a fascinating critique of the Western philosopher’s rationalization of the gradual decline suffered by the people of the Third World in the context of modern world history.

Karen Ng sheds new light on Hegel's famously impenetrable philosophy. She does so by offering a new interpretation of Hegel's idealism and by foregrounding Hegel's Science of Logic, revealing that Hegel's theory of reason revolves around the concept of organic life. Beginning with the influence of Kant's Critique of Judgment on Hegel, Ng argues that Hegel's key philosophical contributions concerning self-consciousness, freedom, and logic all develop around the idea of internal purposiveness, which appealed to Hegel deeply. She charts the development of the purposiveness theme in Kant's third Critique, and argues that the most important innovation from that text is the claim that the purposiveness of nature opens up and enables the operation of the power of judgment. This innovation is essential for understanding Hegel's philosophical method in the Differenzschrift (1801) and Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where Hegel, developing lines of thought from Fichte and Schelling, argues against Kant that internal purposiveness constitutes cognition's activity, shaping its essential relation to both self and world. From there, Ng defends a new and detailed interpretation of Hegel's Science of Logic, arguing that Hegel's Subjective Logic can be understood as Hegel's version of a critique of judgment, in which life comes to be understood as opening up the possibility of intelligibility. She makes the case that Hegel's theory of judgment is modelled on reflective and teleological judgments, in which something's species or kind provides the objective context for predication. The Subjective Logic culminates in the argument that life is a primitive or original activity of judgment, one that is the necessary presupposition for the actualization of self-conscious cognition. Through bold and ambitious new arguments, Ng demonstrates the ongoing dialectic between life and self-conscious cognition, providing ground-breaking ways of understanding Hegel's philosophical system.

The legal regulations and formal rules of democracy alone are not enough to hold a society together and govern its processes. Yet the irreducible ethical pluralism that characterizes contemporary society seems to make it impossible to impose a single system of values as a source of social cohesion and identity reference. In this book, Lucio Cortella argues that Hegel's theory of ethical life can provide such a grounding and makes the case through an analysis of Hegel's central political work, the Philosophy of Right. Although Hegel did not support democratic political ends and wrote in a historical and cultural context far removed from the current liberal-democratic scene, Cortella maintains that the Hegelian theory of ethical life, with its emphasis on securing a framework conducive to human freedom, nevertheless offers a convincing response to the problem of the ethical uprootedness of contemporary democracy.

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel treats the religions of the world under the rubric "the determinate religion." This is a part of his corpus that has traditionally been neglected since scholars have struggled to understand what philosophical work it is supposed to do. In Hegel's Interpretation of the Religions of the World, Jon Stewart argues that Hegel's rich analyses of Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Egyptian and Greek polytheism, and the Roman religion are not simply irrelevant historical material, as is often thought. Instead, they play a central role in Hegel's argument for what he regards as the truth of Christianity. Hegel believes that the different conceptions of the gods in the world religions are reflections of individual peoples at specific periods in history. These conceptions might at first glance appear random and chaotic, but there is, Hegel claims, a discernible logic in them. Simultaneously, a theory of mythology, history, and philosophical anthropology, Hegel's account of the world religions goes far beyond the field of philosophy of religion. The controversial issues surrounding his treatment of the non-European religions are still very much with us today and make his account of religion an issue of continued topicality in the academic landscape of the twenty-first century.

It is well known that Hegel conceives of history as the gradual process of rational thought and of forms of political life. But he is usually thought to place himself at the end of this process. This book argues that an essential part of Hegel's historical-political thinking has escaped the notice of its interpreters.

In Hegel on Political Identity, Lydia Moland provocatively draws on Hegel's political philosophy to engage sometimes contentious contemporary issues such as patriotism, national identity, and cosmopolitanism. Moland argues that patriotism for Hegel indicates an attitude toward the state, whereas national identity is a response to culture. The two combine, Hegel claims, to enable citizens to develop concrete freedom. Moland argues that Hegel's account of political identity extends to his notorious theory of world history; she also proposes that his resistance to cosmopolitanism be reassessed in response to our globalized world. By focusing on Hegel's depiction of political identity as a central part of modern life, Moland shows the potential of Hegel's philosophy to address issues that lie at the heart of ethical and political philosophy.