Hegel: Dialectical Self-Consciousness (Lordship-Bondsman, sec. 178-196 Phenomenology of Spirit)

Apart from the preface, and other famous sections within the Phenomenology of Spirit, the most famous section of Hegel’s Phenomenology is his commentary of lordship and bondage in self-consciousness.  For Hegel, self-consciousness is in itself for itself.  However, the consummation of self-consciousness—that is, self-understanding—depends on the other.  Hegel’s ontology is necessarily dialectic insofar that it …

Hegel on History, IV: The Age of Freedom and End of History

We last left off with Hegel’s philosophy of history with the failure of the Aristocratic Age to produce universal freedom.  If we recall, the Aristocratic Age, that age of great movement, creativity, and the arts, and the dialectic between the aristocrats and plebeians, failed because there was no notion that all men were equal.  This …

Johann Hamann: Philosophy of Language

Johann Hamann is one of the most understudied and unknown philosophers, especially in the English-speaking world.  A figure of tremendous importance to history, who was called the “Magus of the North” and the “brightest star” by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Hamann came to be an influential father of the Sturm und Drang arts movement in Germany, …

Immanuel Kant: Preface to Critique of Pure Reason

Immanuel Kant is a philosopher with a divisive history.  In the English speaking world, he is generally passed over as an inaugurator of the “irrationalist” tradition of Continental Philosophy.  Bertrand Russell, for instance, regarded Kant as a second rate philosopher whose more important contributions to philosophy was ethics rather than what he is most remembered …

Roger Scruton’s Lebenswelt (Soul of the World)

Roger Scruton is one of the most eminent English-speaking philosophers; a scholar in aesthetics, political philosophy, Spinoza, and Kant (and subsequently Kantianism and post-Kantianism), he is a well-known conservative in the proper sense and use of the term.  A skeptic toward market fundamentalism, a critic of the faux virtue and “care” pretentiously claimed in socialism, …