Before and After Hegel

Before and After Hegel
Author: Tom Rockmore
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2003-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780872206472

In this engaging and accessible introduction to Hegel's theory of knowledge, Tom Rockmore brings together the philosopher's life, his thought, and his historical moment--without, however, reducing one to another. Laying out the philosophical tradition of German idealism, Rockmore concisely explicates the theories of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, essential to an understanding of Hegel's thought. He then explores Hegel's formulation of his own position in relation to this tradition and follows Hegel's ideas through the competing interpretations of his successors. Even today, according to Rockmore, Hegel's system remains an essentially modern conception of knowledge, superior to Kant's critical philosophy and surprisingly relevant to our philosophical situation. Rockmore's remarkably lucid and succinct introduction to Hegel's thought, with its distinctively historical approach, will benefit students of philosophy, intellectual history, politics, culture, and society.

After Hegel

After Hegel
Author: Frederick C. Beiser
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2016-09-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0691173710

Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century typically focus on its first half—when Hegel, idealism, and Romanticism dominated. By contrast, the remainder of the century, after Hegel's death, has been relatively neglected because it has been seen as a period of stagnation and decline. But Frederick Beiser argues that the second half of the century was in fact one of the most revolutionary periods in modern philosophy because the nature of philosophy itself was up for grabs and the very absence of certainty led to creativity and the start of a new era. In this innovative concise history of German philosophy from 1840 to 1900, Beiser focuses not on themes or individual thinkers but rather on the period’s five great debates: the identity crisis of philosophy, the materialism controversy, the methods and limits of history, the pessimism controversy, and the Ignorabimusstreit. Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Dilthey play important roles in these controversies but so do many neglected figures, including Ludwig Büchner, Eugen Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Fraunstaedt, Hermann Lotze, Adolf Trendelenburg, and two women, Agnes Taubert and Olga Pluemacher, who have been completely forgotten in histories of philosophy. The result is a wide-ranging, original, and surprising new account of German philosophy in the critical period between Hegel and the twentieth century.

Introduction to the Reading of Hegel

Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
Author: Alexandre Kojève
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1980
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780801492037

Of the first six chapters of the Phenomenology of the spirit -- Summary of the course in 1937-1938 -- Philosophy and wisdom -- A note on eternity, time, and the concept -- Interpretation of the third part of chapter VIII -- A dialectic of the real and the phenomenological method in Hegel.

Emancipation After Hegel

Emancipation After Hegel
Author: Todd McGowan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2019-05-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 023154992X

Hegel is making a comeback. After the decline of the Marxist Hegelianism that dominated the twentieth century, leading thinkers are rediscovering Hegel’s thought as a resource for contemporary politics. What does a notoriously difficult nineteenth-century German philosopher have to offer the present? How should we understand Hegel, and what does understanding Hegel teach us about confronting our most urgent challenges? In this book, Todd McGowan offers us a Hegel for the twenty-first century. Simultaneously an introduction to Hegel and a fundamental reimagining of Hegel’s project, Emancipation After Hegel presents a radical Hegel who speaks to a world overwhelmed by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and economic inequalities. McGowan argues that the revolutionary core of Hegel’s thought is contradiction. He reveals that contradiction is inexorable and that we must attempt to sustain it rather than overcoming it or dismissing it as a logical failure. McGowan contends that Hegel’s notion of contradiction, when applied to contemporary problems, challenges any assertion of unitary identity as every identity is in tension with itself and dependent on others. An accessible and compelling reinterpretation of an often-misunderstood thinker, this book shows us a way forward to a new politics of emancipation as we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of contradiction and find solidarity in not belonging.

The Highway of Despair

The Highway of Despair
Author: Robyn Marasco
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2015-03-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231538898

Hegel's "highway of despair," introduced in his Phenomenology of Spirit, is the tortured path traveled by "natural consciousness" on its way to freedom. Despair, the passionate residue of Hegelian critique, also indicates fugitive opportunities for freedom and preserves the principle of hope against all hope. Analyzing the works of an eclectic cast of thinkers, Robyn Marasco considers the dynamism of despair as a critical passion, reckoning with the forms of historical life forged along Hegel's highway. The Highway of Despair follows Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, and Frantz Fanon as they each read, resist, and reconfigure a strand of thought in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Confronting the twentieth-century collapse of a certain revolutionary dialectic, these thinkers struggle to revalue critical philosophy and recast Left Hegelianism within the contexts of genocidal racism, world war, and colonial domination. Each thinker also re-centers the role of passion in critique. Arguing against more recent trends in critical theory that promise an escape from despair, Marasco shows how passion frustrates the resolutions of reason and faith. Embracing the extremism of what Marx, in the spirit of Hegel, called the "ruthless critique of everything existing," she affirms the contemporary purchase of radical critical theory, resulting in a passionate approach to political thought.

Reading Hegel

Reading Hegel
Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Publisher: re.press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2008
Genre: Electronic books
ISBN: 0980666589

This book incorporates seven 'Introductions' that Hegel wrote for each of his major works: the Phenomenology, Logic, Philosophy of Right, History, Fine Art, Religion and History of Philosophy, and includes an Introduction and Epilogue by the Editors, serving to introduce Hegel to the reader and to situate him and his works into their wider context.

Cognition

Cognition
Author: Tom Rockmore
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780520206618

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the philosopher's first and perhaps greatest work, is the most important philosophical treatise of the nineteenth century. In this companion volume to his general introduction to Hegel, Tom Rockmore offers a passage-by-passage guide to the Phenomenology for first-time readers of the book and others who are not Hegel specialists. Rockmore demonstrates that Hegel's concepts of spirit, consciousness, and reason can be treated as elements of a single, coherent theory of knowledge, one that remains strikingly relevant for the contemporary discussion. He shows how the various conceptions of cognition developed in the text culminate in absolute knowing, which Rockmore reads, in opposition to the frequent religious readings of Hegel, in a wholly secular manner. Unlike commentators who isolate Hegel's text from its philosophical origins, Rockmore analyzes the book in the philosophical context from which it emerged, lucidly discussing notoriously difficult passages in relation to the ideas of Aristotle and Descartes, and above all to those of Kant and other German idealists. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, the philosopher's first and perhaps greatest work, is the most important philosophical treatise of the nineteenth century. In this companion volume to his general introduction to Hegel, Tom Rockmore offers a passage-by-passage guide to the Phenomenology for first-time readers of the book and others who are not Hegel specialists. Rockmore demonstrates that Hegel's concepts of spirit, consciousness, and reason can be treated as elements of a single, coherent theory of knowledge, one that remains strikingly relevant for the contemporary discussion. He shows how the various conceptions of cognition developed in the text culminate in absolute knowing, which Rockmore reads, in opposition to the frequent religious readings of Hegel, in a wholly secular manner. Unlike commentators who isolate Hegel's text from its philosophical origins, Rockmore analyzes the book in the philosophical context from which it emerged, lucidly discussing notoriously difficult passages in relation to the ideas of Aristotle and Descartes, and above all to those of Kant and other German idealists.

Less Than Nothing

Less Than Nothing
Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 1049
Release: 2012-05-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1844678970

A thousand-page resurrection of Hegel, from the bestselling philosopher and critic who has been hailed as “one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals” (New York Review of Books) For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, an influence each new thinker struggles to escape. As a consequence, Hegel’s absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the defining philosopher of the historical transition to modernity, a period with which our own times share startling similarities. Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new period of transition. In Less Than Nothing—the product of a career-long focus on the part of its author—Slavoj Žižek argues it is imperative we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Žižek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with key strands of contemporary thought—Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics, and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.

Hegel's Theory of Madness

Hegel's Theory of Madness
Author: Daniel Berthold-Bond
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780791425053

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.

Inwardness and Existence

Inwardness and Existence
Author: Walter Albert Davis
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 1989
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780299120146

A profound, challenging, wide-ranging book, back in print for a new generation "Inwardness and Existence accomplishes what no book before or after has even approximated: it demonstrates with great lucidity and insight the shared philosophical project that animates psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, and Hegelian dialectics. Davis roots the reader in the enterprise of questioning what is given and probing beyond what is safe in order to demonstrate that psychoanalytic inquiry, Marxist politics, existential reflection, and dialectical connection all move within the same orbit. No one who reads it will ever think about existence itself in the same way again. Davis's landmark work will profoundly transform anyone who reads it."--Todd McGowan, author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan