Interpreting Hegel?s Phenomenology of Spirit

This book focuses on the interpretations of Hegel?s Phenomenology of Spirit that have proved influential over the past decades. Current readers of Hegel?s Phenomenology face an abundance of interpretive literature devoted to this difficult text and confront a plethora of different philosophical presuppositions, research strategies and hermeneutic efforts.To enable a better orientation within the interpretative landscape, the essays in this volume summarize, contextualize and critically comment on the issues and currents in contemporary Phenomenology scholarship. There is a common set of three questions that each of the contributions seeks to answer: (1) What kind of text is The Phenomenology of Spirit? (2) What do the different strategies of interpretation conceptually bring to the text? (3) How do different interpreters justify their verdict on whether the Phenomenology is still a viable project?

"Hegel?s Phenomenology of Spirit is as restless and relevant as ever in this lively collection of essays by new and established scholars alike. Herein are not only insightful introductories for readers approaching Hegel for the first time but also spirited debates on the interpretation of this enduring philosophical masterwork and, in particular, its reception from the twentieth century to the present."

Andrew Cole, Princeton University, USA

"The editors of this volume have collected fourteen "meta-readings" of Hegel?s Phenomenology, that is, discussions of different "strategies" for interpreting this central Hegelian text. The volume contains excellent, critical discussions, for example, of the Heideggerian account of the opening and method of the work, Marxian treatments of the master-slave dialectic, pragmatist or Sellarsian readings of Hegel on Antigone, and on the relation of consciousness to its object. The reader is introduced to a diversity of voices representing a wide range of philosophical traditions; and the diversity of those voices conveys an impression of how Hegel is being read today by philosophers all over the globe."

Sally Sedgwick, Boston University, USA

"This fine volume of essays provides an invaluable and very welcome guide to many of the most significant interpretations, past and present, of Hegel?s Phenomenology of Spirit. Essays by scholars from around the world explore the distinctive merits of (and problems in) the readings of Hegel?s great work by, among others, Marx, Heidegger, Koj?ve, Fanon, de Beauvoir, Jameson, Brandom, McDowell, Pippin, and Comay. These original and engaging essays, which examine topics such as recognition, alienation, spirit, religion and absolute knowing, will help students of Hegel navigate the extraordinarily diverse range of interpretations that confront them, and will also remind more established scholars of the great value of reading one another."

Stephen Houlgate, University of Warwick, UK

"Interpreting  Hegel?s  Phenomenology  of  Spirit  serves  as  a  good  reminder  of  the  extraordinary  philosophical  richness  of  Hegel?s  earlier  work ? [The]  volume  assembles  fourteen  thought-provoking  engagements  with  arguments  in  Hegel?s  Phenomenology,  spanning  topics  in  epistemology,  ethics,  philosophy  of  religion,  hermeneutics, political philosophy, and aesthetics."

Robb Dunphy, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie