Overview

Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit examines a conspicuous feature of Hegel's major works: that they are progressive narratives. They advance from less to more perfect, abstract to concrete, indeterminate or empty to determinate. This is true, argues the author, of his lectures on aesthetics and on the history of philosophy, and it is also true of his most abstract work, the Science of Logic. In answer to the question of why is it so important for Hegel to structure his various philosophical works as developmental narratives, this book defends the thesis that Hegel's motivation is in part metaphysical, intending his developmental accounts to reveal something significant about who we are as thinking, willing natures. He undertakes his study of past in order to demonstrate that there have been advances in the nature of human thought or reason itself and in our resulting freedom and his concern with our reason's development conveys his interest in how human reason is anchored in and shaped by its past. Ultimately, this book specifies the extent to which we can accurately attribute to Hegel the view that human reason and the freedom it affords us are indebted for their nature to this temporal order of nature and history.

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9780192889751

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Sedgwick's book goes a long way to preparing the groundwork for how one might go about answering these difficult questions. Moreover, it lays a groundwork that I find thoroughly appealing because it accounts for the obvious importance that Hegel places on history, time, and contingency, and it does away with the bogeyman representation of Hegel as a philosopher of the Absolute. * Ahilleas Rokni, Graduate Fcaulty Philosophy Journal *

Author Information

In January 2019, Professor Sally Sedgwick joined the Department of Philosophy at Boston University and resigned her position as LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she taught from 2003-2018. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1985, and was on the faculty at Dartmouth College until 2003. Professor Sedgwick has held visiting positions at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the universities of Bonn, Bern and Luzern, and has been awarded grants by NEH, ACLS, DAAD, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Fulbright Foundation.

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