Hegel in Berlin (Part One)

This post is the first of several, dealing with Hegel's time in Berlin from 1818 to 1831. The material is drawn from Karl Rosenkranz's Life of Hegel (1844), the first biography of Hegel. During this time Hegel taught at Berlin University and was involved in the development of Prussian politics, culture and society. Many of his posthumously published lectures date from this period, during which his original works included the Philosophy of Right (1821), the second and third editions of his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (1827, 1830) and some notable contributions to journals.

Hegel in Heidelberg

This is an account of Hegel's time in Heidelberg from 1816 to 1818, drawn from Karl Rosenkranz's Life of Hegel (1844), the first biography of Hegel. It includes discussions of Hegel's essays on Jacobi and on the Wurtemberg Estates. I exclude from this the chapter on the first edition of the Encyclopadia (1817), which I have translated in a previous post.

First edition of the Encyclopedia

There follows a complete translation of the very brief chapter on the first edition of Hegel's Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (1817) in Karl Rosenkranz' Life of Hegel (1844) taken from his coverage of Hegel's time in Heidelberg. The standard English translations of the Encyclopaedia are of the later editions rather than of this edition of which Rosenkranz speaks so highly. William Wallace translated the later editions of the Encyclopaedia Logic (1873) and Philosophy of Mind (1894), with the Encyclopaedia translation only completed in the 1970s with AV Miller's Philosophy of Nature. In this light, Rosenkranz' preference for the first edition is worth pondering.

Brief notes on the Science of Logic

 

These are my notes from the brief chapter on Hegel's Science of Logic in Karl Rosenkranz' Life of Hegel (1844). This gave rise to an interesting exchange of views on the Hegel-list on the nature of the Logic, which we concluded was a logic of experience-as-a-whole rather than a pure development of abstract concepts (as my version of Rosenkranz suggested) or a deceptive removal of layers of abstraction to return to a common sense view of the world (as alleged by Friedrich Trendelenberg and Andrew Seth later in the 19th century).

Hegel and John Macmurray on Personhood and Society

There follows my review from the John Macmurray Newsletter 30, Autumn 2012, of Esther McIntosh's book John Macmurray's Religious Philosophy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). In my view Macmurray's thought contains some views deriving ultimately from Hegel, in particular the Form of the Personal, whilst other ideas are adopted from French phenomenology and the British idealist tradition. The review follows the structure of the book and addresses in turn: the nature of persons; child development; society and politics; and religion.

The John Macmurray Fellowship can be found here.

Hegel in Nuremberg

This post covers my reading of Hegel's period at Nürnberg, including his rectorship at the Aegidiengymnasium and marriage, drawn again from Book II of Karl Rosenkranz's Hegels Leben (1844). I will reserve comments on the Science of Logic for a separate post.

John Macmurray’s Early Milieu

This post reproduces Stephen Cowley's article in the John Macmurray Fellowship Newsletter 24 (2009). The article relates some central ideas of the personalist philosopher John Macmurray (1891-1976) to those of his British Idealist teachers in Glasgow (see photo above, from Kelvingrove Park) and Oxford. The Idealist movement flourished in Victorian and early 20th century Britain, seeking to develop ideas drawn from Kant and Hegel by way of a critique of contemporary empiricist and scientific thought on society and the nature of the mind.

The John Macmurray Fellowship website can be found here.