Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Rethinking in Seventeen Lectures

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Rethinking in Seventeen Lectures provides a clear and philosophically engaging investigation of Hegel’s first masterpiece, perhaps the most revolutionary work of modern philosophy. The book guides the reader on an intellectual adventure that takes up Hegel’s revolutionary strategy of paving the way for doing philosophy without presuppositions by first engaging in a phenomenological investigation of knowing as it appears. That preliminary investigation observes how the prevailing view of knowing that condemns cognition to operating with presuppositions proves unable to justify its own knowledge claims and ends up undermining the distinction between knowing and its object on which that view depends. Unlike other studies of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the work rethinks the entire argument with sustained attention to the project that gives the work its revolutionary significance. Free of unnecessary jargon and always focusing on clearly unraveling the argument in its entirety, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Rethinking in Seventeen Lectures, will be indispensable to undergraduate and graduate students of philosophy, Hegel scholars, and anyone interested in tackling the radical project of doing philosophy without foundations.

Richard Dien Winfield is Distinguished Research Professor of philosophy at the University of Georgia and the author of Reason and Justice; The Just Economy; Overcoming Foundations: Studies in Systematic Philosophy; Freedom and Modernity; Law in Civil Society; Systematic Aesthetics; Stylistics: Rethinking the Artforms After Hegel; The Just Family; Autonomy and Normativity: Investigations of Truth, Right and Beauty; The Just State: Rethinking Self-Government; From Concept to Objectivity: Thinking Through Hegel’s Subjective Logic; Modernity, Religion, and the War on Terror; Hegel and Mind: Rethinking Philosophical Psychology; The Living Mind: From Psyche to Consciousness; and Hegel’s Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures.