Interpreting Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit Expositions and Critique of Contemporary Readings

This book focuses on the interpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that have proved influential over the past decades. Current readers of Hegel’s Phenomenology face an abundance of interpretive literature devoted to this difficult text and confront a plethora of different philosophical presuppositions, research strategies and hermeneutic efforts.To enable a better orientation within the interpretative landscape, the essays in this volume summarize, contextualize and critically comment on the issues and currents in contemporary Phenomenology scholarship. There is a common set of three questions that each of the contributions seeks to answer: (1) What kind of text isThe Phenomenology of Spirit? (2) What do the different strategies of interpretation conceptually bring to the text? (3) How do different interpreters justify their verdict on whether the Phenomenology is still a viable project?

Introduction: On Meta-Readings Sebastian Stein and Ivan Boldyrev 1. Heidegger on the beginning of Hegel’s Phenomenology Ioannis Trisokkas 2. "Now is the night": deixis in Hegel and Maldiney Anna Yampolskaya 3. Truth and (its) appearance in Hegel’s Phenomenology: Brandom, Pippin and Houlgate on Geist and consciousness Sebastian Stein 4. Masters, Slaves, and Us: The Ongoing Allure of the Struggle for Recognition Mariana Teixeira 5. McDowell’s Rejection of Recognition-Based Readings of Hegel in Chapter Four of the Phenomenology of Spirit Paul Redding 6. Self-consciousness and Alienation. The young Marx' Reception of Hegel's master-slave-dialectic Pablo Pulgar Moya 7. Hegel on Death Michael Inwood 8. "Heroism without Fate, Self-Consciousness without Alienation": Antigone, Trust and the Narrative Structure of Spirit Allen Speight 9. Hegel vs. Subjective Duties and External Reasons: Recent Readings of "Morality" and "Conscience" in the Phenomenology of Spirit Sebastian Ostritsch 10. On Comay on Hegel Gunnar Hindrichs 11. Religion in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit Lee Watkins 12. Hegel’s Art-Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Beyond Sven-Olov Wallenstein 13. Absolute Mapping. Jameson’s Variations on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit Jamila Mascat 14. The Last Sigh of Absolute Knowledge: Schiller’s Friendship and Hegel’s Readers Ivan Boldyrev

Ivan Boldyrev is Assistant Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is the author of Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries (2014); Hegel, Institutions and Economics (with Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, 2014); and Die Ohnmacht des Spekulativen: Elemente einer Poetik von Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes (2021). Apart from German Idealism and critical theory, he also works on the history and philosophy of economics. Sebastian Stein is a Lecturer and a DFG Research Associate at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. He is co-editor of Hegel’s Political Philosophy (with Thom Brooks, 2017), Hegel and Contemporary Practical Philosophy (with James Gledhill, 2019) and Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences: A Critical Guide (with Joshua Wretzel, 2021). He has authored several journal articles and book chapters on Aristotle, Kant and post-Kantian idealism.