"This book of Hegalian selections by Professor Weiss is ... very valuable. the passages incorporated are quite excellently chosen. Professor Weiss has included a long excerpt from the introductory chapters of the 'Encyclopaedia', which are Hegel's own, most successful attempt to introduce his system. He has also included some colorful sections from the 'Phenomenology', some weighty sections from the 'Science of Logic', as also the magnificently revealing paragraphs on the Absolute Idea at the end of 'Logic' in the 'Encyclopaedia'. There are also good excerpts from the 'Philosophy of Nature' and 'Philosophy of Right'. And since the translations are good, a great deal of the difficult self-revisionary thought of Hegel comes across, helped by Professor Weiss's own valuable comments."--Foreword.

Conscience, as Binding Words convincingly argues, can only ever be understood, interpreted, and made effective through tropes and figures of language.

An exemplary collection of work from one of the world’s leading scholars of intellectual history László F. Földényi is a writer who is learned in reference, taste, and judgment, and entertaining in style. Taking a place in the long tradition of public intellectual and cultural criticism, his work resonates with that of Montaigne, Rilke, and Mann in its deep insight into aspects of culture that have been suppressed, yet still remain in the depth of our conscious. In this new collection of essays, Földényi considers the fallout from the end of religion and how the traditions of the Enlightenment have failed to replace neither the metaphysical completeness nor the comforting purpose of the previously held mythologies. Combining beautiful writing with empathy, imagination, fascination, and a fierce sense of justice, Földényi covers a wide range of topics that include a meditation on the metaphysical unity of a sculpture group and an analysis of fear as a window into our relationship with time.

The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms marks the culmination of Donald Phillip Verene’s work on Ernst Cassirer and heralds a major step forward in the critical work on the twentieth-century philosopher. Verene argues that Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms cannot be understood apart from a dialectic between the Kantian and Hegelian philosophy that lies within it. Verene takes as his departure point that Cassirer never wishes to argue Kant over Hegel. Instead he takes from each what he needs, realizing that philosophical idealism itself did not stop with Kant but developed to Hegel, and that much of what remains problematic in Kantian philosophy finds particular solutions in Hegel’s philosophy. Cassirer never replaces transcendental reflection with dialectical speculation, but he does transfer dialectic from a logic of illusion, that is, the form of thinking beyond experience as Kant conceives it in the Critique of Pure Reason, to a logic of consciousness as Hegel employs it in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Cassirer rejects Kant’s thing-in-itself but he also rejects Hegel’s Absolute as well as Hegel’s conception of Aufhebung. Kant and Hegel remain the two main characters on his stage, but they are accompanied by a large secondary cast, with Goethe in the foreground. Cassirer not only contributes to Goethe scholarship, but in Goethe he finds crucial language to communicate his assertions. Verene introduces us to the originality of Cassirer’s philosophy so that we may find access to the riches it contains.

Infinite Phenomenology builds on John Russon’s earlier book, Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology, to offer a second reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Here again, Russon writes in a lucid, engaging style and, through careful attention to the text and a subtle attunement to the existential questions that haunt human life, he demonstrates how powerfully Hegel’s philosophy can speak to the basic questions of philosophy. In addition to original studies of all the major sections of the Phenomenology, Russon discusses complementary texts by Hegel, namely, the Philosophy of Spirit, the Philosophy of Right, and the Science of Logic. He concludes with an appendix that discusses the reception and appropriation of Hegel’s Phenomenology in twentieth-century French philosophy. As with Russon’s earlier work, Infinite Phenomenology will remain essential reading for those looking to engage Hegel’s essential, yet difficult, text.

Forty years in the making, this long-awaited reinterpretation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit is a landmark contribution to philosophy by one of the world’s best-known and most influential philosophers. In this much-anticipated work, Robert Brandom presents a completely new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel’s classic The Phenomenology of Spirit. Connecting analytic, continental, and historical traditions, Brandom shows how dominant modes of thought in contemporary philosophy are challenged by Hegel. A Spirit of Trust is about the massive historical shift in the life of humankind that constitutes the advent of modernity. In his Critiques, Kant talks about the distinction between what things are in themselves and how they appear to us; Hegel sees Kant’s distinction as making explicit what separates the ancient and modern worlds. In the ancient world, normative statuses—judgments of what ought to be—were taken to state objective facts. In the modern world, these judgments are taken to be determined by attitudes—subjective stances. Hegel supports a view combining both of those approaches, which Brandom calls “objective idealism”: there is an objective reality, but we cannot make sense of it without first making sense of how we think about it. According to Hegel’s approach, we become agents only when taken as such by other agents. This means that normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, and authority are instituted by social practices of reciprocal recognition. Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take the radical form of magnanimity and trust that Hegel describes, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.

Hegel's analysis of his culture identifies nihilistic tendencies in modernity i.e., the death of God and end of philosophy. Philosophy and religion have both become hollowed out to such an extent that traditional disputes between faith and reason become impossible because neither any longer possesses any content about which there could be any dispute; this is nihilism. Hegel responds to this situation with a renewal of the ontological argument (Logic) and ontotheology, which takes the form of philosophical trinitarianism. Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God examines Hegel's recasting of the theological proofs as the elevation of spirit to God and defense of their content against the criticisms of Kant and Jacobi. It also considers the issue of divine personhood in the Logic and Philosophy of Religion. This issue reflects Hegel's antiformalism that seeks to win back determinate content for truth (Logic) and the concept of God. While the personhood of God was the issue that divided the Hegelian school into left-wing and right-wing factions, both sides fail as interpretations. The center Hegelian view is both virtually unknown, and the most faithful to Hegel's project. What ties the two parts of the book together--Hegel's philosophical trinitarianism or identity as unity in and through difference (Logic) and his theological trinitarianism, or incarnation, trinity, reconciliation, and community (Philosophy of Religion)--is Hegel's Logic of the Concept. Hegel's metaphysical view of personhood is identified with the singularity (Einzelheit) of the concept. This includes as its speculative nucleus the concept of the true infinite: the unity in difference of infinite/finite, thought and being, divine-human unity (incarnation and trinity), God as spirit in his community.

One of Hegel’s most controversial and confounding claims is that “the real is rational and the rational is real.” In this book, one of the world’s leading scholars of Hegel, Jean-François Kervégan, offers a thorough analysis and explanation of that claim, along the way delivering a compelling account of modern social, political, and ethical life. ?Kervégan begins with Hegel’s term “objective spirit,” the public manifestation of our deepest commitments, the binding norms that shape our existence as subjects and agents. He examines objective spirit in three realms: the notion of right, the theory of society, and the state. In conversation with Tocqueville and other theorists of democracy, whether in the Anglophone world or in Europe, Kervégan shows how Hegel—often associated with grand metaphysical ideas—actually had a specific conception of civil society and the state. In Hegel’s view, public institutions represent the fulfillment of deep subjective needs—and in that sense, demonstrate that the real is the rational, because what surrounds us is the product of our collective mindedness. This groundbreaking analysis will guide the study of Hegel and nineteenth-century political thought for years to come.