Hegel: Texts And Commentary

this is a classic text, and one of the best introductions to the philosophy of Hegel. Unfortunately they screwed up the formatting in the Kindle version. In the original, the commentary and the text are on facing pages, which makes the commentary helpful in interpreting the original text. The Kindle version has the commentary all in footnotes in the back, and worst of all, there are no links between the footnotes and the original text. This makes it impossible to read the commentary while reading the text. If you want to read this, and I recommend it, you should buy a paperback version.

Hegel has long been known as being an incomprehensible German philosopher, much like his predecessor Kant, and many others who followed, such as Heidegger and Husserl- sure to confound the casual reader and give even dedicated students headaches. In Hegel: Text and Commentary, famed translator and philosopher Walter Kaufmann, who so skillfully cleansed Nietzsche's bad name after the fallout of WW II, attempts to provide running commentary on Hegel's Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, which attempts to introduce Hegel's philosophy in a readable manner.Kaufmann's notes are helpful in deciphering Hegel's work, but they still fall a bit short, at least for the casual reader. Unlike the eminently readable Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard, Hegel, even with a good translator and guide, is still very difficult material. I'd recommend that anyone studying Hegel's philosophy without prior knowledge of his system also pick up a copy of Fichte's "Vocation of Man", the direct predecessor to Hegel's work. Fichte's philosophy provides the foundation for understanding Hegel's, and makes deciphering his dense prose decidedly easier.

Bad typography and bad layout make this book nearly impossible to read. I've read about a dozen introductions to various philosophers, and this was absolutely the worst one. The book is so poorly laid out, that you can't even tell where some paragraphs begin and end. The translation is on the left pages, the commentary on the right pages. But there's no change in typography between the pages, so the section headings and text seem to jump incoherently.If you want to learn about Hegel philosophy, I suggest finding another source.

This is a delightful summary of the great philosophers' thought.

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