Also recommend other philosophers who are relevant to Hegel>just read Hegelsorry I'm not intelligent enough.
Beiser and Taylor are good starting points. Beiser is much shorter, but Taylor assumes less starting knowledge in the specialist/specific sense, however he also has a "framework" he develops before getting into Hegel proper that you may find daunting if you know literally nothing about the intellectual context of the late 18th century. If that's the case, I recommend Berlin's "Roots of Romanticism" essays/lectures (they're on Youtube but the book version is also good and short) along with Cassirer's Philosophy of the Enlightenment and his Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. If you desperately need more sources/background you could also read something like Becker's Heavenly City (very short), or Peter Gay's The Enlightenment (long). All of these are just suggestions if you find Hegel's intellectual background utterly incomprehensible. For preparation for reading Hegel specifically, if you still need it, the di Giovanni / Harris anthology "Between Kant and Hegel" is helpful when read in tandem with Beiser's Fate of Reason, which isn't nearly as long as his German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism. You will have to grapple with Kant to at least some extent but he can be "read around" in a pinch. Hegel is one of those thinkers where the more you understand about what he was implicitly responding to, the more you will understand elements of his system that seem like he's pulling them straight from his ass. A lot of things that are taught at university as if they're just part of some gnostic cosmology Hegel concocted while taking shitloads of LSD are integrations of relatively straightforward concepts and problematics from Kant (obviously), but also from Schiller, Goethe, and from controversies/key dialogues like the Lessing/Jacobi controversy (Pantheismusstreit), etc. Oddly a lot of people are now conversant with this specialist knowledge, as of the last 30 years anyway, but they neglect the Enlightenment and Rousseauist element in Hegel.
>>23619951I had some introductory lectures about Enlightenment figures and wrote a short thesis on Immanuel Kant's political writings. But I wouldn't say I'm extremely familiar with him.Thanks for your recommendations!
>>23619933General: Wallace - Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present (great place to start even though it focuses more on Plato)Wallace's Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God is fabulous too but not as accessible as the other work mentioned or Pinkhard.Pinkhard - Hegel's Naturalism (short and easy to get at the cost of being deflationary. Read Wallace first so you don't think this is all there is to Hegel. However, it is a good summary of much of his thought)Dorrien - Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit (best intro, this would be the other place to start because you get a good background in Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. It's focused on how these thinkers influenced theology so the later part of the book might not interest you much but the first few chapters are the single best intro to the German Idealists I know)Charles Taylor's Hegel (comprehensive and quite good, although there is some stuff on freedom he seems to get quite wrong)Phenomenology of Spirit:Harris' Hegel's Ladder, just be aware that it is written in Hegelese to a decent degree. But it also is not deflationary and has paragraph by paragraph plain(er) English summaries.Kalkavage's The Logic of Desire has some good stuff too.The Logics:Houlgate's The Opening of Hegel's Logic Pippin's Realm of Shadows is alright too but I think it is inferior Philosophy of Right is actually the most accessible and I would try reading this one.These are all on Libgen I think.D.C. Schindler's The Perfection of Freedom is a really good examination of freedom in German Idealism. But honestly I would start with his Freedom From Reality which shows how modern definitions of freedom in terms of pure potency have serious issues. It mostly looks at Locke as a typical modern and then compared this with Aristotle and Plato. The next volume, Retrieving Freedom, is a magisterial work covering freedom in Plotinus, St. Denys, St. Maximus, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Bonneventure, St. Thomas, Scotus, and Ockham. It will show the tradition Hegel's conception of freedom grows out of, but it's just a great work in general.Hegel is very much pulling on the pre-modern conception of freedom as "the self-determining self-actualizing capacity to do the Good," as opposed to the modern definition of "freedom to choose anything."Bernsteintapes.com has a graduate seminar on the Phenomenology for free, and it's good although not my favorite take.
>>23620177Oh and Houlgate has an entire class on the Logic on YouTube if you like videos.Lauer's Hegel's Conception of God from SUNY press is another good one if you're interested in that part of his philosophy.Lemon's Philosophy of History is the best intro on that subject and has a great treatment of Hegel's philosophy of history, but much else besides.
>>23620187And if you want to think about how the political philosophy might be applied today then Axel Honneth's Freedom's Right is a good one, particularly the intro chapters. Obviously there is Fukuyama's The End of History too, but this is a terrible text for learning about Hegel DESU. Personally, I find his two volume opus on state development to be vastly superior to the book he got famous for (mostly because it's an encyclopedic treatment of the field).
>>23620177>>23620187>>23620203Thank you!
Charles Taylor’s Hegel was a tremendous help for my initial understanding. Taylor is often viewed as representing the traditional metaphysical reading of Hegel. Another book which helped me a lot was the Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Especially: “You Can’t Get from Here to There” - Robert Pippin (deflationary reading of Phenomenology of Spirit)and “Hegel’s Idealism: the Logic of Conceptuality” - Thomas WartenbergBoth of these are under 50 pages.
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>>23619933nlab
