Michael Inwood (Editor) - A Commentary on Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind

A COMMENTARY ON HEGELS PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

Michael Inwood, an eminent scholar of German philosophy, presents a full and detailed new commentary on a classic work of the nineteenth century. Philosophy of Mind is the third part of Hegels Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, in which he summarizes his philosophical system. It is one of the main pillars of his thought. Inwood gives the clear and careful guidance needed for an understanding of this challenging work. In his editorial introduction he offers a philosophically sophisticated evaluation of Hegels ideas which includes a survey of the whole of his thought and detailed analysis of the terminology he used. This volume is issued simultaneously with a companion volume containing Inwoods translation of the Philosophy of Mind.

Michael Inwood is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Trinity College, Oxford.

M. J. INWOOD

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Michael Inwood 2007

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First published 2007
First published in paperback 2010

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This book is concerned with Geist. Geist is both mind and spirit. It is the mind of an individual. It is the spirit of a people. It is art, religion, and philosophy. It is the Holy Spirit. Geist is the dominant concept in Hegels philosophy. It propels his thought onward and upward. Geist itself, in Hegels view, propels humanity onward and upward. If there is any secret of Hegel, that secret is Geist. But what is Geist? Can it bear all the meanings Hegel assigns to it? Can it perform the multitude of tasks that Hegel requires of it? Such are the questions that this Introduction attempts to answer.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. After leaving the local high school, he enrolled in the philosophy faculty of Tbingen university in 1788, but later transferred to the theological faculty with the aim of becoming a Lutheran pastor. On graduating in 1793, he followed the common practice of serving as a private tutor to the children of a wealthy family, first in Berne and later in Frankfurt. During this period he wrote some essays on Christianity, which in general regret, and attempt to explain, its degeneration into a positive religion, a religion of prescribed dogmas, rules, and rituals, in contrast to the folk-religion of ancient Greece that it supplanted. The most important of these essays, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, argued that Jesus originally preached a religion of love, but that it had to become a religion of law, a positive religion, in order to convert mankind. Despite the occurrence of the word spirit (