Hegel’s Encyclopedic System

This book discusses the most comprehensive of Hegel’s works: his long-neglected Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. It contains original essays by internationally renowned and emerging voices in Hegel scholarship. Their contributions elucidate fundamental aspects of Hegel’s encyclopedic system with an eye to its contemporary relevance. The book thus addresses system-level claims about Hegel’s unique conceptions of philosophy, philosophical "science" and its method, dialectic, speculative thinking, and the way they relate to both Hegelian and contemporary notions of nature, history, religion, freedom, and cultural praxis.

1. Introduction Sebastian Stein and Joshua Wretzel 2. Hegel’s science of reason as a science of freedom: from Nuremberg to Heidelberg Klaus Vieweg 3. Hegel’s Heidelberg Encyclopedia as the principal work of a metaphysics of Geist Jens Halfwassen 4. Philosophy as the Science of Freedom Luca Illetterati 5. Hegel’s System and the Negativity of Dialectic Anton Friedrich Koch 6. The Encyclopedia as a Form of Worship Roberto Vinco 7. Between Religion and the Empirical Sciences: Hegel’s Concept of philosophical science according to the Introduction to the Encyclopedia Friedrike Schick 8. Temporal Strata of Historical Experience in Hegel’s Encyclopedia Christopher Yeomans 9. Hegel’s Logic as a System of Illegitimate Totalities Michaela Bordignon 10. Nature’s Otherness: On the Status of Nature in Hegel’s Encyclopedic System Johannes-Georg Schülein 11. The Two Souls: On the Difference Between Human and Animal Cognition in Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and Philosophy of Nature Luca Corti 12. Truth and Method in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences Joshua Wretzel 13. Objective Geist Today Jean-François Kervégan 14. The Absolute Spirit as the Consummation of Hegel’s Concept of Truth Tobias Dangel 15. The Proximity of Philosophy to Religion: Hegel’s Evaluative Reason Dean Moyar 16. Hegel’s notion of philosophy: the concept-based unity of self-referential universality and differentiated particularity Sebastian Stein

Sebastian Stein is currently a research associate and assistant lecturer at Heidelberg University where he is sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for a project on philosophical method. He has published several chapters and journal articles on Kant, post-Kantian idealism and Aristotle and has guest-edited and contributed to a special volume of the Hegel Bulletin on Hegel and Aristotle (2020). Together with Thom Brooks, Dr. Stein has edited and contributed to the collection Hegel’s Practical Philosophy (2017) and with James Gledhill, he has edited and contributed to Hegel and contemporary practical philosophy (Routledge 2020). His chapter on absolute idealism features in the Blackwell Guide to Nineteenth Century Philosophy and as editor and contributor, he has a collection forthcoming on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and a critical guide to Hegel’s Encyclopedia. Joshua Wretzel is Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. He has received fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and the Max Kade German-American Research Institute, which funded stays at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg and Universität Leipzig, respectively. His work on the German philosophical tradition is published in the European Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Philosophical Research, Hegel Bulletin, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, and Continental Philosophy Review. He is co-editor, with Sebastian Stein, of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences: A Critical Guide, forthcoming.