Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy Volume 3 (of 3)
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Some scanning errors · 36 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~210,000 words · 982 passages
Cite this work
- APAHegel. (n.d.). Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy Volume 3 (of 3). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/hegel-s-lectures-on-the-history-of-philosophy-volume-3-of-3
- MLAHegel. "Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy Volume 3 (of 3)." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/hegel-s-lectures-on-the-history-of-philosophy-volume-3-of-3.
- ChicagoHegel. Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy Volume 3 (of 3). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel/hegel-s-lectures-on-the-history-of-philosophy-volume-3-of-3.
What it is about
The third volume of Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy, coming down to his own contemporaries.
Context and history
One should know how these books were made: Hegel did not write them. They are lectures he gave several times, reconstructed after his death from his own notes and from students' notebooks, which the editors fused into continuous prose. The voice is his, the wording is not, and when a sentence sounds too well turned it is worth remembering that. The underlying thesis is that the history of philosophy is not a catalogue of opinions but a single development, and that each system preserves what came before it.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The first period embraces a space of one thousand years—from Thales, 550 B.C., to Proclus, who died 485 A.D., and until the disappearance of pagan philosophy as an outward institution, 529 A.D. The second period extends to the sixteenth century, and thus again embraces a thousand years, to pass over which we must provide ourselves with seven-leagued boots. While Philosophy has hitherto found its place in the religion of the heathen, from this time on it has its sphere within the Christian world; for Arabians and Jews have only to be noticed in an external and historic way. 1. Through the Neo-Platonic philosophy we have come into quite familiar acquaintance with the Idea of Christianity, as the new religion which has entered into the world. For the Neo-Platonic philosophy has as its essential principle the fact that the Absolute is determined as spirit in a concrete way, that God is not a mere conception. Although the Absolute is Thought, it must, in order to be true, be concrete in itself and not abstract; in what we have just seen we have, then, the first appearance of the absolutely existent spirit. But in spite of their profound and true speculation, the Neo-Platonists still had not proved their doctrine that the Trinity is the truth, for there is lacking to it the form of inward necessity. The Neo-Platonists begin from the One that determines itself, that sets a limit to itself from which the determinate proceeds; this, however, is itself an immediate method of presentation, and it is this that makes such philosophers as Plotinus and Proclus so tiresome. Undoubtedly dialectic considerations enter in, in which the opposites which are conceived as absolute are shown to be null; but this dialectic is not methodical, but occurs only disconnectedly. The principle of retroversion and comprehension found with the Neo-Platonists is that of substantiality generally, but because subjectivity
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