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WorkGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Lectures on the History of Philosophy

Hegel tells the history of philosophy from Thales to Schelling as a single argument, in which every system is a stage and none a mistake.

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel2,811 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie
First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
German

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Overview

Johann Jakob Brucker's Historia critica philosophiae (1742–44), the standard Latin history of philosophy for much of the eighteenth century, credited Thales with a whole string of doctrines, among them that nothing can come from nothing — on the grounds that a man who thought water eternal must have denied creation. Hegel called the book dead weight, and his lectures open against the view of the subject it stood for: that the history of philosophy is a gallery of opinions, or worse of follies, which proves only that no philosopher was ever right. His answer is that the succession of systems is one line of thought working itself out. Each philosophy grasps a stage of the truth that had to be reached; none is simply refuted; and the latest contains everything before it, which is why, as he told his students, no one can be a Platonist now. The shape of the lectures follows from the claim. Philosophy proper, Hegel held, begins in Greece: China and India get a brief prelude, in which he found Confucius's moral teaching sound but commonplace; the Middle Ages are crossed, in his words, in seven-league boots; and with Descartes thought reaches home, like a sailor calling out land after a long voyage. He gave the course nine times between 1805 and 1830. After his death his pupil Karl Ludwig Michelet assembled the text from Hegel's Jena manuscript, his later notes and his hearers' transcripts, and published it in three volumes from 1833 to 1836; Elizabeth Haldane's English translation followed from 1892. Because Michelet's text splices different years together, editors since the 1980s have gone back to the transcripts and published single courses on their own.

Key concepts

What does Hegel mean when he says no philosophy is refuted?

He means that what is refuted is never a philosophy's principle, only its claim to be the final and complete truth. Each system grasped one necessary stage, and that stage survives as a part of every later one. This is why he tells his students that nobody can be a Platonist, Aristotelian, Stoic or Epicurean today: those principles live on inside later thought and cannot be revived on their own.

Why is a philosophy not an opinion, for Hegel?

An opinion is a notion someone happens to hold, one among many that could just as well be otherwise. Philosophy, Hegel insists, contains no opinions at all: it is the thinking knowledge of what is true, and its content does not belong to one person. So telling its history as a list of who thought what misses the subject, as a history of science would if it listed only mistakes.

Why does philosophy need freedom to begin, on Hegel's account?

Because to think freely about everything, a mind must first know itself as free. Philosophy appears, Hegel argues, only where a people holds that the individual as such has infinite worth, the same consciousness that lets political freedom flourish. Where a person counts only as absorbed in something greater, a ruler or a divine whole, thought cannot yet stand on its own, and what results is at most a prelude.

What was wrong with Brucker's history of philosophy, for Hegel?

Johann Jakob Brucker's standard history dressed the ancient thinkers in ideas they never had. He took a philosopher's simple saying and added all the premises and consequences it would have in the school metaphysics of his own century, then reported the result as historical fact. So Thales, who thought water eternal, is credited with denying that the world was created from nothing. Hegel called the book dead weight.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

No system simply refuted

Is the history of philosophy a graveyard of failed opinions, or one argument still going on? If every great system grasped a stage of the truth, none of them was simply wrong.

Hegel opens against the view that the systems form a gallery of opinions, even follies, proving only that nobody was ever right. Philosophy contains no opinions, he answers; the systems are stages of one line of thought working itself out, each grasping a principle that had to be reached. None is simply refuted, only as the last word, and the latest contains all before it, which is why no one can be a Platonist or a Stoic now. Historians who miss this hear every note and no harmony.

  • history of philosophy
  • philosophical method
  • truth
  • dialectics
  • spirit
  • concept
  • thought
  • reason
  • speculative philosophy

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Where philosophy begins

Why does philosophy start in one place and not another? For Hegel it needs a people that knows the individual as free, and so it begins, properly speaking, in Greece.

Philosophy proper, the lectures hold, arises only where a people is conscious of freedom: where the individual knows itself as having infinite worth, and political freedom can flourish. China and India receive a brief prelude, in which Confucius's moral teaching is judged sound but commonplace. With Thales the history really begins, because 'water is the principle' is the first attempt to grasp everything through one universal thought. The long Greek story follows, from Heraclitus, whom Hegel counts as wholly taken up into his own Logic, through Plato and Aristotle to the Stoics and Skeptics.

  • ancient philosophy
  • freedom
  • political philosophy
  • religion
  • ethics
  • aristotle
  • stoicism
  • skepticism
  • nature
  • universals
  • substance
  • education

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Thought comes home

When does thought stop borrowing its authority and start from itself? The lectures find that turn in the modern age, after a thousand medieval years crossed at speed.

Hegel crosses the Middle Ages, in his own words, in seven-league boots. Modern philosophy begins when thought knows that it comes independently from reason and that self-consciousness is an essential part of truth. Jakob Böhme is hailed as the first German philosopher for the Protestant principle of seeking within one's own heart what used to lie beyond. With Descartes, who began everything anew, thought is at home at last, like a sailor who cries 'land' after a long voyage. The course runs on through Spinoza, Locke, Kant and Fichte to Schelling, and ends in thanks.

  • self-consciousness
  • subjectivity
  • epistemology
  • empiricism
  • idealism
  • metaphysics
  • perception
  • knowledge

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Within this work

passages held
2,811
distinct concepts
1,555
by passages held, corpus-wide
#12

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “freedom” and “subjectivity”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 89 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
freedomsubjectivity26
self-consciousnesssubjectivity25
reasonreligion23
religionsubjectivity22
freedomself-consciousness20
metaphysicsreason18
freedomreligion16
reasonself-consciousness16
epistemologysubjectivity14
epistemologyreason13
epistemologymetaphysics11
reasonsubjectivity10
metaphysicsreligion8
religionself-consciousness8
dialecticssubjectivity7
dialecticsfreedom6
epistemologyself-consciousness6
metaphysicsself-consciousness6
dialecticsepistemology5
freedomreason5
dialecticsself-consciousness4
epistemologyreligion4
freedommetaphysics3
dialecticsmetaphysics2
dialecticsreligion2
metaphysicssubjectivity2
dialecticsreason1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1801 The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy (Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie)

    The book that opened Hegel's Jena years and first put his name before the public — as Schelling's ally, a role his essays for their Critical Journal continued.

     DE
  2. 1802 Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen)

    Written at the height of the alliance with Schelling: the longest of Hegel's pieces for their journal, and his fullest early reckoning with Kant.

     DE
  3. 1802 How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme)

    Of Hegel's reviews for the Critical Journal, the most openly mocking: the journal's programme of severity turned on a single named Kantian.

     DE
  4. 1802 On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism (Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt)

    Unsigned, and claimed for both editors ever since: the programme at the head of the journal Hegel and Schelling ran in 1802–03, which Hegel's reviews in its later issues put into practice.

     DE
  5. 1802 On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law (Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts)

    Spread across the Critical Journal's last two issues: Hegel's longest published early writing on law and the state, composed while he was still an unsalaried lecturer at Jena.

     DE
  6. 1802 Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy (Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie)

    Between the Krug review and Faith and Knowledge in the Critical Journal's run, the essay in which Hegel first says what doubt does for philosophy.

     DE
  7. 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Die Phänomenologie des Geistes)

    Written as Napoleon's army entered Jena and published in 1807, the book Hegel meant as the doorway into his system — and the one many readers still enter him through.

     DE
  8. 1812 Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik)

    The larger of Hegel's two versions of the Logic, written away from any university while he ran a Nuremberg school; the metaphysical core the rest of the system rests on.

     DE
  9. 1817 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse)

    The frame for Hegel's other books: its first part condenses the Science of Logic, and the Philosophy of Right expands one section of its third part. Hegel taught from it and rewrote it twice.

     DEEN
  10. 1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)

    The last book Hegel published in his lifetime apart from new editions of the Encyclopaedia: the textbook of his Berlin law lectures, and the one of his books most argued over by political readers.

     DE
  11. 1831 On the English Reform Bill (Über die englische Reformbill)

    Some three decades after his first, unpublished pamphlets on Württemberg and on the German constitution, Hegel's last venture into the politics of the day.

     DE
  12. 1833 Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie) you are here DE
  13. 1835 The Philosophy of Fine Art (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik)

    Not a book Hegel wrote but Berlin lectures assembled by a student after his death — the most influential philosophy of art of the nineteenth century, and a contested reconstruction of it.

     EN
  14. 1835 Who Thinks Abstractly? (Wer denkt abstrakt?)

    Hegel in the manner of a magazine essayist: short, comic and aimed at the general reader, though he never published it himself.

     DE
  15. 1837 Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte)

    For decades the most widely read of Hegel's works, and now the most contested — lectures on world history, published after his death, reading it as the growth of human freedom.

     DE
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