Abstract

‘Force and Understanding’ is the title, or part of the title, of the third section of Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes, his ‘phenomenology of spirit’. That was his first book; it was published in 1807 as Volume One of his System of Science. A second volume, he announced, would contain ‘the system of Logic as speculative philosophy, and of the other two parts of philosophy, the sciences of Nature and Spirit’. But no such volume appeared: although in 1812 his Science of Logic was published as ‘the first sequel to the Phenomenology of Spirit in an expanded arrangement of the system’, Hegel added to the 1831 edition a note explaining that since then he had brought out his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences ‘in place of the projected second part’.