" This revision, based on continuing research, keeps this book in the forefront of Hegelian scholarship.

Introduction It could well seem that I am being facetious if I refer to this study as "a book in search of a title," but many an author will recognize that ...

A clear summary of Husserl's often obscure and always complex writings. . . . very instructive.-Ethics.

"This is a splendid, substantial volume." -Clio.

...If one takes a panoramic view of Hegel’s entire philosophical endeavor, the endeavor to come to grips with and to be committed to reality in the concrete, one is struck by one inescapable idea: the Hegelian enterprise is an extraordinarily unified and grandiose attempt to elaborate one concept, which Hegel sees as the root of all intelligibility, the concept of God, whatever that term is going to turn out to mean.......The question with which we are faced...is neither whether Hegel is (...) correct in what he says nor whether his interpreters are justified in what they say of him. Rather the question is one of finding out just what Hegel does say and of determining what impact that can have on our own thinking.......Why, then, the “Concept of God”? The answer is to be found in the culmination of the entire Hegelian system, “The Philosophy of Absolute Spirit.” Only in the light of “absolute Spirit” is anything Hegel says intelligible....in Hegel’s view, “absolute Spirit” is in fact to be identified with God and that, therefore, only if Hegel’s “Concept of God” is intelligible, will anything Hegel says be intelligible.—From the Introduction. (shrink)

"The most authoritative version of Hegel's "Introduction" to his lectures on the history of philosophy.

"The most authoritative version of Hegel's 'Introduction' to his lectures on the history of philosophy. The translation is a model of its kind." - International Philosophical Quarterly.

A clear summary of Husserl's often obscure and always complex writings. . . . very instructive.-Ethics.

Authority is a moral power of the community in whose service it is exercised through constitutive consent for coordinating its functions and achieving its purpose.

To those who are already familiar with the minute and detailed erudition which went into M.J. Petry’s three-volume translation of and commentary on Hegel’s “Philosophy of Subjective Spirit” as presented in the 1830 edition of the Encyclopedia, it will come as no surprise that the same author has presented in this sequel an equally meticulous study of the Berlin “Phenomenology of Spirit.” There is, however, a significant difference to be found in this latter work. Whereas, in the earlier “Philosophy of (...) Subjective Spirit”, Petry was content to translate and comment on the 1845 Zusätze, drawn from a variety of sources by Ludwig Boumann, he has been able in the present text to substitute a set of lecture notes written by Major Karl Gustav von Griesheim who attended Hegel’s lectures in Berlin during the Summer Term of 1825, the most complete single set of notes on those lectures now available. Petry assures us that Griesheim must have taken down Hegel’s lectures word for word, thus, presumably, assuring us of a text which is at once more reliable and more authoritative than the Encyclopedia text which Hegel himself had published - this, despite the many utter incoherences of Griesheim’s text! If nothing else, this explains the disproportionate number of notes devoted to Griesheim’s text rather than to Hegel’s; Petry is concerned not with the Encyclopedia but with the “Lectures” - and Griesheim’s transcript is the most reliable order to make sense out of Griesheim. (shrink)