In this significant contribution to Hegel scholarship, Robert Williams develops the most comprehensive account to date of Hegel's concept of recognition. Fichte introduced the concept of recognition as a presupposition of both Rousseau's social contract and Kant's ethics. Williams shows that Hegel appropriated the concept of recognition as the general pattern of his concept of ethical life, breaking with natural law theory yet incorporating the Aristotelian view that rights and virtues are possible only within a certain kind of community. He (...) explores Hegel's intersubjective concept of spirit as the product of affirmative mutual recognition and his conception of recognition as the right to have rights. Examining Hegel's Jena manuscripts, his _Philosophy of Right_, the _Phenomenology of Spirit_, and other works, Williams shows how the concept of recognition shapes and illumines Hegel's understandings of crime and punishment, morality, the family, the state, sovereignty, international relations, and war. A concluding chapter on the reception and reworking of the concept of recognition by contemporary thinkers including Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze demonstrates Hegel's continuing centrality to the philosophical concerns of our age. (shrink)

v. 1. Introduction and the concept of religion -- v. 2. Determinate religion -- v. 3. The consummate religion.

An English translation of Hegel's introduction to his lectures on the philosophy of history, based directly on the standard German edition by Johannes Hoffmeister, first published in 1955. The previous English translation, by J. Sibree, first appeared in 1857 and was based on the defective German edition of Karl Hegel, to which Hoffmeister's edition added a large amount of new material previously unknown to English readers, derived from earlier editors. In the introduction to his lectures, Hegel lays down the principles (...) and aims which underlie his philosophy of history, and provides an outline of the philosophy of history itself. The comprehensive and voluminous survey of world history which followed the introduction in the original lectures is of less interest to students of Hegel's thought than the introduction, and is therefore not included in this volume. (shrink)

These essays On Hegel's political philosophy are taken from Ritter's influential Metaphysik and Politik. They discuss the importance of Hegel's evaluation of modernity by focusing upon his unique conceptions of property relations, morality, civil society, and the state.Ritter's work has played a seminal role in rekindling interest in Hegel's social and political philosophy. Ritter's clarity of expression makes Hegel's concepts accessible to a wide audience of philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and others concerned with the legitimacy of modernity, the relation (...) of society and the state, or in Hegel's relation to Marx and other later thinkers.Joachim Ritter was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Istanbul. This book is in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. (shrink)