|
COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Michael J. Inwood. New York: Routledge, 1983 (2002). Xxxiv + 582 pages.
Michael J. Inwood's study of Hegel, reissued this year by Routledge in its "Arguments of the Philosophers" series nearly twenty years after its first appearance, is, like Hegel's own works, a long, sprawling, ambitious, provocative, and difficult text. It is not well suited as an introduction to Hegel, although a number of individual sections could be used as valuable supplements to other readings. Readers first encountering Hegel would be disadvantaged by the absence of a general overview of Hegel's philosophy as a whole, by the lack of historical and philosophic context for his work, and by the choice of Hegel's logic and metaphysics as the central focus, to the relative exclusion of his writings on phenomenology, history, art, and politics. For those already familiar with Hegel's philosophy, though, this is a substantial contribution, a sometimes flawed but always challenging and intelligent book.
The structure of the book is rather quirky. The main discussion of Hegel's system does not begin until halfway through the 582-page work. The first half of the book begins with a long "Prelude" (Part One), which examines Hegel's distinction between three forms of conscious experience (perception, conception, and pure thought); the way in which pure thought is an integral aspect of Hegel's portrait of the self; and the relation between philosophic thought and empirical science. These are undeniably important themes, and Inwood's careful process of exegesis and analysis deftly draws the reader into critical reflection on some of Hegel's basic assumptions. On the other hand, it is quite misleading to describe the Prelude as "a sort of introduction to [Hegel's] system as a whole" (5). In the account of the Hegelian system which follows, Inwood devotes nearly all of his attention to just one work, The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophic Sciences (and then primarily to the first of its three volumes, the Logic), a work consisting of the lecture notes Hegel compiled for his courses at Heidelberg and Berlin between 1816 and 1830 and supplemented by the posthumous addition of class notes recorded by various of his students. And while the issues Inwood addresses in the Prelude certainly serve...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
