Abstract

The recent publication of the second edition of this monumental work by Hösle on Hegel’s philosophical system, which appeared for the first time in 1988, is surely to be regarded as one of the most important and encouraging events in continental philosophy this past decade. For, on the one hand, the very necessity of a second edition obviously indicates that the first fortunately did not escape the attention of a wide readership. On the other hand, it adds a postscript, in which a forthright self-critique is provided with respect to what seems to me to be the most questionable thesis presented in this work, i.e. the primacy of the category of intersubjectivity over that of subjectivity. A brief but interesting paper on Hegel and Spinoza follows the Postscript. Such a self-critique, together with some enlightening remarks on the shortcomings of contemporary Marxist and historicist interpretations of Hegel’s absolute idealism—which should be construed as the completion of the tradition of Western idealistic metaphysics initiated by Parmenides and Plato—unquestionably shows that the development of Hösle’s thought in these years has moved in the very direction which is logically required by the peculiar character of its original “systematic-theoretical” approach to Hegelian philosophy.