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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
August 27, 1770
Stuttgart, Württemberg
November 14, 1831 (aged 61)
Berlin, Prussia
|19th-century philosophy
|Western Philosophy
|German Idealism; Founder of Hegelianism; Historicism
|Main interests
|Logic, Philosophy of history, Aesthetics, Religion, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Political Philosophy,
|Notable ideas
|Absolute idealism, Dialectic, Sublation, master-slave dialectic
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Template:IPA-de) (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.
Hegel developed a comprehensive philosophical framework, or "system", of Absolute idealism to account in an integrated and developmental way for the relation of mind and nature, the subject and object of knowledge, and psychology, the state, history, art, religion and philosophy. In particular, he developed the concept that mind or spirit manifested itself in a set of contradictions and oppositions that it ultimately integrated and united, without eliminating either pole or reducing one to the other. Examples of such contradictions include those between nature and freedom, and between immanence and transcendence.
Hegel influenced writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (Strauss, Bauer, Feuerbach, Stirner, T. H. Green, Marx, F. H. Bradley, Dewey, Sartre, Küng, Kojève, Fukuyama, Žižek, Brandom, Iqbal) and his detractors (Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Peirce, Popper, Russell, Heidegger).[2] His influential conceptions are of speculative logic or "dialectic", "absolute idealism", "Spirit", negativity, sublation (Aufhebung in German), the "Master/Slave" dialectic, "ethical life" and the importance of history.
- 1 Life
- 2 Works
- 3 Thought
- 4 Legacy
- 5 Selected works
- 6 Secondary literature
- 7 See also
- 8 Notes
- 9 Further reading
- 10 External links
Early years
Hegel was born on August 27, 1770 in Stuttgart, in the Duchy Württemberg in southwestern Germany. Christened Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, he was known as Wilhelm to his close family. His father, Georg Ludwig, was Rentkammersekretär (secretary to the revenue office) at the court of Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg.[3] Hegel's mother, Maria Magdalena Louisa (née Fromm), was the daughter of a lawyer at the High Court of Justice at the Württemberg court. She died of a "bilious fever" (Gallenfieber) when Hegel was eleven. Hegel and his father also caught the disease but narrowly survived.[4] Hegel had a sister, Christiane Luise (1773–1832), and a brother, Georg Ludwig (1776–1812), who was to perish as an officer in Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812.[5]
At the age of three Hegel went to the "German School". When he entered the "Latin School" aged five, he already knew the first declension, having been taught it by his mother.
In 1776 Hegel entered Stuttgart's Gymnasium Illustre. During his adolescence Hegel read voraciously, copying lengthy extracts in his diary. Authors he read include the poet Klopstock and writers associated with the Enlightenment such as Christian Garve and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Hegel's studies at the Gymnasium were concluded with his Abiturrede ("graduation speech") entitled "The abortive state of art and scholarship in Turkey."
Tübingen (1788-93)
At the age of eighteen Hegel entered the Tübinger Stift (a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tübingen), where two fellow students were to become vital to his development—his exact contemporary, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and the younger brilliant philosopher-to-be Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Sharing a dislike for what they regarded as the restrictive environment of the Seminary, the three became close friends and mutually influenced each other's ideas. They watched the unfolding of the French Revolution with shared enthusiasm. Schelling and Hölderlin immersed themselves in theoretical debates on Kantian philosophy, from which Hegel remained aloof. Hegel at this time envisaged his future as that of a Popularphilosoph, i.e., a "man of letters" who serves to make the abstruse ideas of philosophers accessible to a wider public; his own felt need to engage critically with the central ideas of Kantianism did not come until 1800.
Bern (1793–96) and Frankfurt (1797–1801)
Having received his theological certificate (Konsistorialexamen) from the Tübingen Seminary, Hegel became Hofmeister (house tutor) to an aristocratic family in Bern (1793–96). During this period he composed the text which has become known as the "Life of Jesus" and a book-length manuscript entitled "The Positivity of the Christian Religion". His relations with his employers having become strained, Hegel gladly accepted an offer mediated by Hölderlin to take up a similar position with a wine merchant's family in Frankfurt, where he moved in 1797. Here Hölderlin exerted an important influence on Hegel's thought.[6] While in Frankfurt Hegel composed the essay "Fragments on Religion and Love". In 1799 he wrote another essay entitled "The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate" which was not published during his lifetime.
Career years
Jena, Bamberg and Nuremberg: 1801-1816
In 1801 Hegel came to Jena with the encouragement of his old friend Schelling, who was Extraordinary Professor at the University there. Hegel secured a position at the University as a Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) after submitting a Habilitationsschrift (dissertation) on the orbits of the planets. Later in the year Hegel's first book, The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy, appeared. He lectured on "Logic and Metaphysics" and, with Schelling, gave joint lectures on an "Introduction to the Idea and Limits of True Philosophy" and held a "Philosophical Disputorium". In 1802 Schelling and Hegel founded a journal, the Kritische Journal der Philosophie ("Critical Journal of Philosophy") to which they each contributed pieces until the collaboration was ended by Schelling's departure for Würzburg in 1803.
In 1805 the University promoted Hegel to the position of Extraordinary Professor (unsalaried), after Hegel wrote a letter to the poet and minister of culture Johann Wolfgang von Goethe protesting at the promotion of his philosophical adversary Jakob Friedrich Fries ahead of him.[7] Hegel attempted to enlist the help of the poet and translator Johann Heinrich Voß to obtain a post at the newly renascent University of Heidelberg, but failed; to his chagrin, Fries was later in the same year made Ordinary Professor (salaried) there.[8]
His finances drying up quickly, Hegel was now under great pressure to deliver his book, the long-promised introduction to his System. Hegel was putting the finishing touches to this book, now called the Phenomenology of Spirit, as Napoleon engaged Prussian troops on October 14, 1806, in the Battle of Jena on a plateau outside the city. On the day before the battle, Napoleon entered the city of Jena. Hegel recounted his impressions in a letter to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer:
I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it . . . this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire.[9]
Although Napoleon chose not to close down Jena as he had other universities, the city was devastated and students deserted the university in droves, making Hegel's financial prospects even worse. The following February Hegel's landlady Christiana Burkhardt (who had been abandoned by her husband) gave birth to their son Georg Ludwig Friedrich Fischer (1807–31).[10]
In March 1807, aged 37, Hegel moved to Bamberg, where Niethammer had declined and passed on to Hegel an offer to become editor of a newspaper, the Bamberger Zeitung. Hegel, unable to find more suitable employment, reluctantly accepted. Ludwig Fischer and his mother (whom Hegel may have offered to marry following the death of her husband) stayed behind in Jena.[11]
He was then, in November 1808, again through Niethammer, appointed headmaster of a Gymnasium in Nuremberg, a post he held until 1816. While in Nuremberg Hegel adapted his recently published Phenomenology of Mind for use in the classroom. Part of his remit being to teach a class called "Introduction to Knowledge of the Universal Coherence of the Sciences", Hegel developed the idea of an encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences, falling into three parts (logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of spirit).[12]
Hegel married Marie Helena Susanna von Tucher (1791–1855), the eldest daughter of a Senator, in 1811. This period saw the publication of his second major work, the Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik; 3 vols., 1812, 1813, 1816), and the birth of his two legitimate sons, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm (1813–1901) and Immanuel Thomas Christian (1814–1891).
Heidelberg and Berlin: 1816-1831
Having received offers of a post from the Universities of Erlangen, Berlin, and Heidelberg, Hegel chose Heidelberg, where he moved in 1816. Soon after, in April 1817, his illegitimate son Ludwig Fischer (now ten years old) joined the Hegel household, having thus far spent his childhood in an orphanage.[13] (Ludwig's mother had died in the meantime.)[14]
Hegel published The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817) as a summary of his philosophy for students attending his lectures at Heidelberg.
In 1818 Hegel accepted the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, which had remained vacant since Fichte's death in 1814. Here he published his Philosophy of Right (1821). Hegel devoted himself primarily to delivering his lectures; his lecture courses on aesthetics, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of history, and the history of philosophy were published posthumously from lecture notes taken by his students. His fame spread and his lectures attracted students from all over Germany and beyond.
Hegel was appointed Rector of the University in 1830, when he was 60. He was deeply disturbed by the riots for reform in Berlin in that year. In 1831 Frederick William III decorated him for his service to the Prussian state. In August 1831 a cholera epidemic reached Berlin and Hegel left the city, taking up lodgings in Kreuzberg. Now in a weak state of health, Hegel seldom went out. As the new semester began in October, Hegel returned to Berlin, with the (mistaken) impression that the epidemic had largely subsided. By November 14 Hegel was dead. The physicians pronounced the cause of death as cholera, but it is likely he died from a different gastrointestinal disease.[15] He is said to have uttered the last words "And he didn't understand me" before expiring.[16] In accordance with his wishes, Hegel was buried on November 16 in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery next to Fichte and Solger.
Hegel's son Ludwig Fischer had died shortly before while serving with the Dutch army in Batavia; the news of his death never reached his father.[17] Early the following year Hegel's sister Christiane committed suicide by drowning. Hegel's sons Karl, who became a historian, and Immanuel, who followed a theological path, lived long lives during which they safeguarded their father's Nachlaß and produced editions of his works.
Hegel published only four books during his lifetime: the Phenomenology of Spirit (or Phenomenology of Mind), his account of the evolution of consciousness from sense-perception to absolute knowledge, published in 1807; the Science of Logic, the logical and metaphysical core of his philosophy, in three volumes, published in 1811, 1812, and 1816 (revised 1831); Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a summary of his entire philosophical system, which was originally published in 1816 and revised in 1827 and 1830; and the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, his political philosophy, published in 1822. In the latter, he criticized von Haller's reactionary work, which claimed that laws were not necessary. He also published some articles early in his career and during his Berlin period. A number of other works on the philosophy of history, religion, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy were compiled from the lecture notes of his students and published posthumously.French Revolution for Hegel constitutes the introduction of real individual political freedom into European societies for the first time in recorded history. But precisely because of its absolute novelty, it is also unlimited with regard to everything that preceded it: on the one hand the upsurge of violence required to carry out the revolution cannot cease to be itself, while on the other, it has already consumed its opponent. The revolution therefore has nowhere to turn but onto its own result: the hard-won freedom is consumed by a brutal Reign of Terror. History, however, progresses by learning from its mistakes: only after and precisely because of this experience can one posit the existence of a constitutional state of free citizens, embodying both the benevolent organizing power of rational government and the revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality. Hegel's remarks on the French revolution led German poet Heinrich Heine to label him "The Orléans of German Philosophy".
Hegel's thinking can be understood as a constructive development within the broad tradition that includes Plato and Kant. To this list one could add Proclus, Meister Eckhart, Leibniz, Plotinus, Jakob Boehme, and Rousseau. What all these thinkers share, which distinguishes them from materialists like Epicurus, the Stoics, and Thomas Hobbes, and from empiricists like David Hume, is that they regard freedom or self-determination both as real and as having important ontological implications, for soul or mind or divinity. This focus on freedom is what generates Plato's notion (in the Phaedo, Republic, and Timaeus) of the soul as having a higher or fuller kind of reality than inanimate objects possess. While Aristotle criticizes Plato's "Forms", he preserves Plato's cornerstones of the ontological implications for self-determination: ethical reasoning, the soul's pinnacle in the hierarchy of nature, the order of the cosmos, and an assumption with reasoned arguments for a prime mover. Plato's high esteem of individual sovereignty Kant imports to his considerations of moral and noumenal freedom, and God. All three find common ground on the unique position of humans in the scheme of things, known by the discussed categorical differences from animals and inanimate objects.
In his discussion of "Spirit" in his Encyclopedia, Hegel praises Aristotle's On the Soul as "by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic".[18] In his Phenomenology of Spirit and his Science of Logic, Hegel's concern with Kantian topics such as freedom and morality, and with their ontological implications, is pervasive. Rather than simply rejecting Kant's dualism of freedom versus nature, Hegel aims to subsume it within "true infinity", the "Concept" (or "Notion": Begriff), "Spirit", and "ethical life" in such a way that the Kantian duality is rendered intelligible, rather than remaining a brute "given."
The reason why this subsumption takes place in a series of concepts is that Hegel's method, in his Science of Logic and his Encyclopedia, is to begin with ultra-basic concepts like Being and Nothing, and to develop these through a long sequence of elaborations, including those mentioned in the previous paragraph. In this manner, a solution that is reached, in principle, in the account of "true infinity" in the Science of Logic's chapter on "Quality", is repeated in new guises at later stages, all the way to "Spirit" and "ethical life", in the third volume of the Encyclopedia.
In this way, Hegel intends to defend the germ of truth in Kantian dualism against reductive or eliminative programs like those of materialism and empiricism. Like Plato, with his dualism of soul versus bodily appetites, Kant pursues the mind's ability to question its felt inclinations or appetites and to come up with a standard of "duty" (or, in Plato's case, "good") which transcends bodily restrictiveness. Hegel preserves this essential Platonic and Kantian concern in the form of infinity going beyond the finite (a process that Hegel in fact relates to "freedom" and the "ought"[19]), the universal going beyond the particular (in the Concept), and Spirit going beyond Nature. And Hegel renders these dualities intelligible by (ultimately) his argument in the "Quality" chapter of the "Science of Logic." The finite has to become infinite in order to achieve reality. The idea of the absolute excludes multiplicity so the subjective and objective must achieve synthesis to become whole. This is because, as Hegel suggests by his introduction of the concept of "reality",[20] what determines itself—rather than depending on its relations to other things for its essential character—is more fully "real" (following the Latin etymology of "real": more "thing-like") than what does not. Finite things don't determine themselves, because, as "finite" things, their essential character is determined by their boundaries, over against other finite things. So, in order to become "real", they must go beyond their finitude ("finitude is only as a transcending of itself"[21]).
The result of this argument is that finite and infinite—and, by extension, particular and universal, nature and freedom—don't face one another as two independent realities, but instead the latter (in each case) is the self-transcending of the former.[22] Rather than stress the distinct singularity of each factor that complements and conflicts with others—without explanation—the relationship between finite and infinite (and particular and universal, and nature and freedom) becomes intelligible as a progressively developing and self-perfecting whole.
The obscure writings of Jakob Böhme had a strong effect on Hegel. Böhme had written that the Fall of Man was a necessary stage in the evolution of the universe. This evolution was, itself, the result of God's desire for complete self-awareness. Hegel was fascinated by the works of Kant, Rousseau, and Goethe, and by the French Revolution. Modern philosophy, culture, and society seemed to Hegel fraught with contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and object of knowledge, mind and nature, self and Other, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Hegel's main philosophical project was to take these contradictions and tensions and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called "the absolute idea" or "absolute knowledge".
According to Hegel, the main characteristic of this unity was that it evolved through and manifested itself in contradiction and negation. Contradiction and negation have a dynamic quality that at every point in each domain of reality—consciousness, history, philosophy, art, nature, society—leads to further development until a rational unity is reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts by lifting them up (Aufhebung) to a higher unity. This whole is mental because it is mind that can comprehend all of these phases and sub-parts as steps in its own process of comprehension. It is rational because the same, underlying, logical, developmental order underlies every domain of reality and is ultimately the order of self-conscious rational thought, although only in the later stages of development does it come to full self-consciousness. The rational, self-conscious whole is not a thing or being that lies outside of other existing things or minds. Rather, it comes to completion only in the philosophical comprehension of individual existing human minds who, through their own understanding, bring this developmental process to an understanding of itself.
"Mind" and "Spirit" are the common English translations of Hegel's use of the German "Geist". Some have argued that either of these terms overly "psychologize" Hegel,[citation needed] implying a kind of disembodied, solipsistic consciousness like ghost or "soul." Geist combines the meaning of spirit—as in god, ghost or mind—with an intentional force. In Hegel's early philosophy of nature (draft manuscripts written during his time at the University of Jena), Hegel's notion of "Geist" was tightly bound to the notion of "Aether" from which Hegel also derived the concepts of space and time; however in his later works (after Jena) Hegel did not explicitly use his old notion of "Aether" any more.[23]
Central to Hegel's conception of knowledge and mind (and therefore also of reality) was the notion of identity in difference, that is that mind externalizes itself in various forms and objects that stand outside of it or opposed to it, and that, through recognizing itself in them, is "with itself" in these external manifestations, so that they are at one and the same time mind and other-than-mind. This notion of identity in difference, which is intimately bound up with his conception of contradiction and negativity, is a principal feature differentiating Hegel's thought from that of other philosophers.
Civil society
Hegel made the distinction between civil society and state in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right.[24] In this work, civil society (Hegel used the term "buergerliche Gesellschaft" though it is now referred to as Zivilgesellschaft in German to emphasize a more inclusive community) was a stage on the dialectical relationship between Hegel's perceived opposites, the macro-community of the state and the micro-community of the family.[25] Broadly speaking, the term was split, like Hegel's followers, to the political left and right. On the left, it became the foundation for Karl Marx's civil society as an economic base;[26] to the right, it became a description for all non-state aspects of society, including culture, society and politics.[27] This liberal distinction between political society and civil society was followed by Alexis de Tocqueville.[26]
According to Hegel, "Heraclitus is the one who first declared the nature of the infinite and first grasped nature as in itself infinite, that is, its essence as process. The origin of philosophy is to be dated from Heraclitus. His is the persistent Idea that is the same in all philosophers up to the present day, as it was the Idea of Plato and Aristotle."[28] For Hegel, Heraclitus's great achievements were to have understood the nature of the infinite, which for Hegel includes understanding the inherent contradictoriness and negativity of reality, and to have grasped that reality is becoming or process, and that "being" and "nothingness" are mere empty abstractions. According to Hegel, Heraclitus's "obscurity" comes from his being a true (in Hegel's terms "speculative") philosopher who grasped the ultimate philosophical truth and therefore expressed himself in a way that goes beyond the abstract and limited nature of common sense and is difficult to grasp by those who operate within common sense. Hegel asserted that in Heraclitus he had an antecedent for his logic: "... there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my logic."[29]Hegel cites a number of fragments of Heraclitus in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy.[30] One to which he attributes great significance is the fragment he translates as "Being is not more than Non-being", which he interprets to mean
Sein und Nichts sei dasselbe
Being and non-being are the same.
Heraclitus does not form any abstract nouns from his ordinary use of "to be" and "to become" and in that fragment seems to be opposing any identity A to any other identity B, C, etc., which is not-A. Hegel, however, interprets not-A as not existing at all, not nothing at all, which cannot be conceived, but indeterminate or "pure" being without particularity or specificity.[31] Pure being and pure non-being or nothingness are for Hegel pure abstractions from the reality of becoming, and this is also how he interprets Heraclitus. This interpretation of Heraclitus cannot be ruled out, but even if present is not the main gist of his thought.
For Hegel, the inner movement of reality is the process of God thinking, as manifested in the evolution of the universe of nature and thought; that is, Hegel argued that, when fully and properly understood, reality is being thought by God as manifested in a person's comprehension of this process in and through philosophy. Since human thought is the image and fulfillment of God's thought, God is not ineffable (so incomprehensible as to be unutterable) but can be understood by an analysis of thought and reality. Just as humans continually correct their concepts of reality through a dialectical process, so God himself becomes more fully manifested through the dialectical process of becoming.
For his god Hegel does not take the logos of Heraclitus but refers rather to the nous of Anaxagoras, although he may well have regarded them the same, as he continues to refer to god's plan, which is identical to God. Whatever the nous thinks at any time is actual substance and is identical to limited being, but more remains to be thought in the substrate of non-being, which is identical to pure or unlimited thought.
The universe as becoming is therefore a combination of being and non-being. The particular is never complete in itself but to find completion is continually transformed into more comprehensive, complex, self-relating particulars. The essential nature of being-for-itself is that it is free "in itself"; that is, it does not depend on anything else, such as matter, for its being. The limitations represent fetters, which it must constantly be casting off as it becomes freer and more self-determining.[32]
Although Hegel began his philosophizing with commentary on the Christian religion and often expresses the view that he is a Christian, his ideas of God are not at home among some Christians, although he has had a major influence on 19th- and 20th-century theology. At the same time, an atheistic version of his thought was adopted instead by some Marxists, who, stripping away the concepts of divinity, styled what was left dialectical materialism, which some saw as originating in Heraclitus.
Hegel's thoughts on the person of Jesus Christ stood out from the theologies of the Enlightenment. In his posthumous book, The Christian Religion: Lectures on Philosophy of Religion Part 3, he espouses that, "God is not an abstraction but a concrete God...God, considered in terms of his eternal Idea, has to generate the Son, has to distinguish himself from himself; he is the process of differentiating, namely, love and Spirit". This means that Jesus as the Son of God is posited by God over against himself as other. Hegel sees both a relational unity and a metaphysical unity between Jesus and God the Father. To Hegel, Jesus is both divine and Human. Hegel further attests that God (as Jesus) not only died, but "...rather, a reversal takes place: God, that is to say, maintains himself in the process, and the latter is only the death of death. God rises again to life, and thus things are reversed." Hegel therefore maintains not only the deity of Jesus, but the resurrection as a reality.
There are views of Hegel's thought as a representation of the summit of early 19th century Germany's movement of philosophical idealism. It would come to have a profound impact on many future philosophical schools, including schools that opposed Hegel's specific dialectical idealism, such as Existentialism, the historical materialism of Karl Marx, historicism, and British Idealism.
Hegel's influence was immense both within philosophy and in the other sciences. Throughout the 19th century many chairs of philosophy around Europe were held by Hegelians, and Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels--among many others—were all deeply influenced by, but also strongly opposed to, many of the central themes of Hegel's philosophy. After less than a generation, Hegel's philosophy was suppressed and even banned by the Prussian right-wing, and was firmly rejected by the left-wing in multiple official writings.
After the period of Bruno Bauer, Hegel's influence did not make itself felt again until the philosophy of British Idealism and the 20th century Hegelian Western Marxism that began with Georg Lukács. The more recent movement of communitarianism has a strong Hegelian influence.
Reading Hegel
Some of Hegel's writing was intended for those with advanced knowledge of philosophy, although his "Encyclopedia" was intended as a textbook in a university course. Nevertheless, like many philosophers, Hegel assumed that his readers would be well-versed in Western philosophy, up to and including Descartes, Hume, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. For those wishing to read his work without this background, introductions to and commentaries about Hegel can contribute to comprehension, although the reader is faced with multiple interpretations of Hegel's writings from incompatible schools of philosophy. The German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno devoted an essay to the difficulty of reading Hegel and asserted that there are certain passages where it is impossible to decipher what Hegel meant. Difficulties within Hegel's language and thought are magnified for those reading Hegel in translation, since his philosophical language and terminology in German often do not have direct analogues in other languages. For example, the German word "Geist" has connotations of both "mind" and "spirit" in English. English translators have to use the "phenomenology of mind" or "the phenomenology of spirit" to render Hegel's "Phaenomenologie des Geistes", thus altering the original meaning. Hegel himself argued, in his "Science of Logic", that the German language was particularly conducive to philosophical thought and writing.
One especially difficult aspect of Hegel's work is his innovation in logic. In response to Immanuel Kant's challenge to the limits of pure reason, Hegel developed a radically new form of logic, which he called speculation, and which is today popularly called dialectics. The difficulty in reading Hegel was perceived in Hegel's own day, and persists into the 21st century. To understand Hegel fully requires paying attention to his critique of standard logic, such as the law of contradiction and the law of the excluded middle. Many philosophers who came after Hegel and were influenced by him, whether adopting or rejecting his ideas, did so without fully absorbing his new speculative or dialectical logic.[citation needed]
If one wanted to provide a big piece of the Hegel puzzle to the beginner, one might present the following statement from Part One of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences: The Logic:
... a much misunderstood phenomenon in the history of philosophy — the refutation of one system by another, of an earlier by a later. Most commonly the refutation is taken in a purely negative sense to mean that the system refuted has ceased to count for anything, has been set aside and done for. Were it so, the history of philosophy would be, of all studies, most saddening, displaying, as it does, the refutation of every system which time has brought forth. Now although it may be admitted that every philosophy has been refuted, it must be in an equal degree maintained that no philosophy has been refuted. And that in two ways. For first, every philosophy that deserves the name always embodies the Idea: and secondly, every system represents one particular factor or particular stage in the evolution of the Idea. The refutation of a philosophy, therefore, only means that its barriers are crossed, and its special principle reduced to a factor in the completer principle that follows.
Left and Right Hegelianism
Some historians have spoken of Hegel's influence as represented by two opposing camps. The Right Hegelians, the allegedly direct disciples of Hegel at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, advocated a Protestant orthodoxy and the political conservatism of the post-Napoleon Restoration period. The Left Hegelians, also known as the Young Hegelians, interpreted Hegel in a revolutionary sense, leading to an advocation of atheism in religion and liberal democracy in politics.
In more recent studies, however, this paradigm has been questioned.[33] No Hegelians of the period ever referred to themselves as "Right Hegelians"; that was a term of insult originated by David Strauss, a self-styled Left Hegelian. Critiques of Hegel offered from the Left Hegelians radically diverted Hegel's thinking into new directions and eventually came to form a disproportionately large part of the literature on and about Hegel.[citation needed]
The Left Hegelians also spawned Marxism, which inspired global movements, encompassing the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and myriad revolutionary practices up until the present moment.
Twentieth-century interpretations of Hegel were mostly shaped by British Idealism, logical positivism, Marxism, and Fascism. The Italian Fascist Giovanni Gentile, according to Benedetto Croce, "...holds the honor of having been the most rigorous neo-Hegelian in the entire history of Western philosophy and the dishonor of having been the official philosopher of Fascism in Italy."[34] However, since the fall of the USSR, a new wave of Hegel scholarship arose in the West, without the preconceptions of the prior schools of thought. Walter Jaeschke and Otto Pöggeler in Germany, as well as Peter Hodgson and Howard Kainz in America are notable for their recent contributions to post-USSR thinking about Hegel.
In previous modern accounts of Hegelianism (to undergraduate classes, for example), especially those formed prior to the Hegel renaissance, Hegel's dialectic was most often characterized as a three-step process, "thesis, antithesis, synthesis"; namely, that a "thesis" (e.g. the French Revolution) would cause the creation of its "antithesis" (e.g. the Reign of Terror that followed), and would eventually result in a "synthesis" (e.g. the constitutional state of free citizens). However, Hegel used this classification only once, and he attributed the terminology to Immanuel Kant. The terminology was largely developed earlier by Johann Fichte. It was spread by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus in a popular account of Hegelian philosophy, and since then the misfit terms have stuck [citation needed]. What is wrong with the "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" approach is that it gives the sense that things or ideas are contradicted or opposed by things that come from outside them. To the contrary, the fundamental notion of Hegel's dialectic is that things or ideas have internal contradictions. From Hegel's point of view, analysis or comprehension of a thing or idea reveals that underneath its apparently simple identity or unity is an underlying inner contradiction. This contradiction leads to the dissolution of the thing or idea in the simple form in which it presented itself and to a higher-level, more complex thing or idea that more adequately incorporates the contradiction. The triadic form that appears in many places in Hegel (e.g. being-nothingness-becoming, immediate-mediate-concrete, abstract-negative-concrete) is about this movement from inner contradiction to higher-level integration or unification.
Believing that the traditional description of Hegel's philosophy in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis was mistaken, a few scholars, like Raya Dunayevskaya, a devout Marxist who was once Leon Trotsky's secretary, have attempted to discard the triadic approach altogether. According to their argument, although Hegel refers to "the two elemental considerations: first, the idea of freedom as the absolute and final aim; secondly, the means for realising it, i.e. the subjective side of knowledge and will, with its life, movement, and activity" (thesis and antithesis) he doesn't use "synthesis" but instead speaks of the "Whole": "We then recognised the State as the moral Whole and the Reality of Freedom, and consequently as the objective unity of these two elements." Furthermore, in Hegel's language, the "dialectical" aspect or "moment" of thought and reality, by which things or thoughts turn into their opposites or have their inner contradictions brought to the surface, what he called "aufhebung", is only preliminary to the "speculative" (and not "synthesizing") aspect or "moment", which grasps the unity of these opposites or contradiction. Thus for Hegel, reason is ultimately "speculative", not "dialectical".
It is widely admitted today[35] that the old-fashioned description of Hegel's philosophy in terms of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" is inaccurate. Nevertheless, such is the persistence of this misnomer that the model and terminology survive in a number of scholarly works.
In the latter half of the 20th century, Hegel's philosophy underwent a major renaissance. This was due to: (a) the rediscovery and reevaluation of Hegel as a possible philosophical progenitor of Marxism by philosophically oriented Marxists; (b) a resurgence of the historical perspective that Hegel brought to everything; and (c) an increasing recognition of the importance of his dialectical method. The book that did the most to reintroduce Hegel into the Marxist canon was perhaps Georg Lukács' History and Class Consciousness. This sparked a renewed interest in Hegel reflected in the work of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Raya Dunayevskaya, Alexandre Kojève and Gotthard Günther among others. The Hegel renaissance also highlighted the significance of Hegel's early works, i.e. those published prior to the Phenomenology of Spirit. The direct and indirect influence of Kojève's lectures and writings (on the Phenomenology of Spirit, in particular) mean that it is not possible to understand most French philosophers from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jacques Derrida without understanding Hegel.[citation needed]
Beginning in the 1960s, Anglo-American Hegel scholarship has attempted to challenge the traditional interpretation of Hegel as offering a metaphysical system: this has also been the approach of Z.A. Pelczynski and Shlomo Avineri. This view, sometimes referred to as the 'non-metaphysical option', has had a decided influence on many major English language studies of Hegel in the past 40 years. U.S. neoconservative political theorist Francis Fukuyama's controversial book The End of History and the Last Man was heavily influenced by Alexandre Kojève. Among modern scientists, the physicist David Bohm, the mathematician William Lawvere, the logician Kurt Gödel and the biologist Ernst Mayr have been interested in Hegel's philosophical work.[citation needed]
A late 20th century literature in Western Theology that is friendly to Hegel includes such writers as Dale M. Schlitt (1984), Theodore Geraets (1985), Philip M. Merklinger (1991), Stephen Rocker (1995) and Cyril O'Regan (1995). The contemporary theologian Hans Küng has also advanced contemporary scholarship in Hegel studies.
Recently, two prominent American philosophers, John McDowell and Robert Brandom (sometimes, half-seriously, referred to as the Pittsburgh Hegelians), have produced philosophical works exhibiting a marked Hegelian influence. Each is avowedly influenced by the late Wilfred Sellars, also of Pittsburgh, who referred to his seminal work, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, as a series of "incipient Méditations Hegeliennes" (in homage to Edmund Husserl's treatise, Meditations Cartesiennes).
Beginning in the 1990s, after the fall of the USSR, a fresh reading of Hegel took place in the West. For these scholars, fairly well represented by the Hegel Society of America and in cooperation with German scholars such as Otto Pöggeler and Walter Jaeschke, Hegel's works should be read without preconceptions. Marx plays a minor role in these new readings, and some contemporary scholars have suggested that Marx's interpretation of Hegel is irrelevant to a proper reading of Hegel. Some American philosophers associated with this movement include Clark Butler, Vince Hathaway, Daniel Shannon, David Duquette, David MacGregor, Edward Beach, John Burbidge, Lawrence Stepelevich, Rudolph Siebert, Randall Jackwak, Theodore Geraets and William Desmond.
Criticism of Hegel has been widespread in the 19th and the 20th centuries; a diverse range of individuals including Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Eric Voegelin and A. J. Ayer have challenged Hegelian philosophy from a variety of perspectives. Among the first to take a critical view of Hegel's system was the 19th Century German group known as the Young Hegelians, which included Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and their followers. In Britain, the Hegelian British Idealism school (members of which included Francis Herbert Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, and, in the United States, Josiah Royce) was challenged and rejected by analytic philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell; Russell, in particular, considered "almost all" of Hegel's doctrines to be false.[36] Logical positivists such as Alfred Jules Ayer and the Vienna Circle also criticized Hegelian philosophy and its supporters, such as F. H. Bradley.
Hegel's contemporary Schopenhauer was particularly critical, and wrote of Hegel's philosophy as "a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking" [37] Kierkegaard criticized Hegel's 'absolute knowledge' unity [38] Scientist Ludwig Boltzmann also criticized the obscure complexity of Hegel's works, referring to Hegel's writing as an "unclear thoughtless flow of words".[39] Bertrand Russell stated that Hegel was "the hardest to understand of all the great philosophers" in his Unpopular Essays and A History of Western Philosophy.
Karl Popper makes the claim in the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies that Hegel's system formed a thinly veiled justification for the absolute rule of Frederick William III, and that Hegel's idea of the ultimate goal of history was to reach a state approximating that of 1830s Prussia. Popper further proposed that Hegel's philosophy served not only as an inspiration for communist and fascist totalitarian governments of the 20th century, whose dialectics allow for any belief to be construed as rational simply if it could be said to exist. This view of Hegel as an apologist of state power and precursor of 20th century totalitarianism was criticized by Herbert Marcuse in his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, on the grounds that Hegel was not an apologist for any state or form of authority simply because it existed: for Hegel the state must always be rational. Other scholars, e.g. Walter Kaufmann and Shlomo Avineri, have also criticized Popper's theories about Hegel.[40] Isaiah Berlin listed Hegel as one of the six architects of modern authoritarianism who undermined liberal democracy, along with Rousseau, Helvetius, Fichte, Saint-Simon, and Maistre.[41]
Selected works
Published during Hegel's lifetime
- Life of Jesus
- Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie, 1801
- The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy, tr. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf, 1977
- The German Constitution, 1802
- Phänomenologie des Geistes, 1807
- Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J. B. Baillie, 1910; 2nd ed. 1931
- Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller, 1977
- Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Terry Pinkard, 2010
- Wissenschaft der Logik, 1812, 1813, 1816
- Science of Logic, tr. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers, 2 vols., 1929; tr. A. V. Miller, 1969; tr. George di Giovanni, 2010
- Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 1817; 2nd ed. 1827; 3rd ed. 1830 (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences)
- (Pt. I:) The Logic of Hegel, tr. William Wallace, 1874, 2nd ed. 1892; tr. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris, 1991; tr. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom 2010
- (Pt. II:) Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, tr. A. V. Miller, 1970
- (Pt. III:) Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, tr. William Wallace, 1894; rev. by A. V. Miller, 1971
- Elements of the Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox, 1942; tr. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood, 1991
Published posthumously
- Lectures on Aesthetics
- Lectures on the Philosophy of History (also translated as Lectures on the Philosophy of World History) 1837
- Lectures on Philosophy of Religion
- Lectures on the History of Philosophy
Secondary literature
General introductions
- Francke, Kuno, Howard, William Guild, Schiller, Friedrich, 1913-1914 The German classics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: masterpieces of German literature translated into English Vol 7, Jay Lowenberg, The Life of Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel. URL accessed on 2010-09-24.
- Beiser, Frederick C., 2005. Hegel. Routledge
- Findlay, J. N., 1958. Hegel: A Re-examination. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-519879-4
- Gouin, Jean-Luc, 2000. Hegel ou de la Raison intégrale, suivi de : « Aimer Penser Mourir : Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud en miroirs », Montréal (Québec), Éditions Bellarmin, 225 p. ISBN 2-89007-883-3
- Houlgate, Stephen, 2005. An Introduction to Hegel. Freedom, Truth and History. Oxford: Blackwell
- Kainz, Howard P., 1996. G. W. F. Hegel. Ohio University Press. ISBN 0-8214-1231-0.
- Kaufmann, Walter, 1965. Hegel: A Reinterpretation. New York: Doubleday (reissued Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978)
- Plant, Raymond, 1983. Hegel: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell
- Singer, Peter, 2001. Hegel: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press (previously issued in the OUP Past Masters series, 1983)
- Stirling, James Hutchison, The Secret of Hegel: Being the Hegelian System in Origin Principle, Form and Matter
- Taylor, Charles, 1975. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29199-2. A comprehensive exposition of Hegel's thought and its impact on the central intellectual and spiritual issues of his and our time.
- Scruton, Roger, "Understanding Hegel" in The Philosopher on Dover Beach, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1990. ISBN 0-85635-857-6
- Beiser, Frederick C. (ed.), 1993. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-38711-6. A collection of articles covering the range of Hegel's thought.
- Adorno, Theodor W., 1994. Hegel: Three Studies. MIT Press. Translated by Shierry M. Nicholsen, with an introduction by Nicholsen and Jeremy J. Shapiro, ISBN 0-262-51080-4. Essays on Hegel's concept of spirit/mind, Hegel's concept of experience, and why Hegel is difficult to read.
- Althaus, Horst, 1992. Hegel und die heroischen Jahre der Philosophie. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag. Eng. tr. Michael Tarsh as Hegel: An Intellectual Biography, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000
- Pinkard, Terry P., 2000. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-49679-9. By a leading American Hegel scholar; aims to debunk popular misconceptions about Hegel's thought.
- Rosenkranz, Karl, 1844. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben. Still an important source for Hegel's life.
- Hondt, Jacques d', 1998. Hegel: Biographie. Calmann-Lévy /// Recension (2009) de cette biographie en tandem avec celle de Horst Althaus (1999), parue dans la revue Nuit Blanche : Le Commissaire et le Détective
- Rockmore, Tom, 1993. Before and After Hegel: A Historical Introduction to Hegel's Thought. Indianapolis: Hackett. ISBN 0-87220-648-3.
- Löwith, Karl, 1964. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought. Translated by David E. Green. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hegel's development
- Lukács, Georg, 1948. Der junge Hegel. Zürich and Vienna (2nd ed. Berlin, 1954). Eng. tr. Rodney Livingstone as The Young Hegel, London: Merlin Press, 1975. ISBN 0-262-12070-4
- Harris, H. S., 1972. Hegel's Development: Towards the Sunlight 1770-1801. Oxford: Clarendon Press
- Harris, H. S., 1983. Hegel's Development: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801-1806). Oxford: Clarendon Press
- Dilthey, Wilhelm, 1906. Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels (repr. in Gesammelte Schriften, 1959, vol. IV)
- Haering, Theodor L., 1929, 1938. Hegel: sein Wollen und sein Werk, 2 vols. Leipzig (repr. Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1963)
Recent English-language literature
- Inwood, Michael, 1983. Hegel. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (Arguments of the Philosophers)
- Rockmore, Tom, 1986. Hegel's Circular Epistemology. Indiana University Press
- Pinkard, Terry P., 1988. Hegel's Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility. Temple University Press
- Westphal, Kenneth, 1989. Hegel's Epistemological Realism. Kluwer Academic Publishers
- Forster, Michael N., 1989. Hegel and Skepticism. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-38707-4
- Pippin, Robert B., 1989. Hegel's Idealism: the Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-37923-7. Advocates a stronger continuity between Hegel and Kant.
- Maker, William, 1994. Philosophy Without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel. State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-2100-7.
- Winfield, Richard Dien, 1989. Overcoming Foundations: Studies in Systematic Philosophy. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-07008-X.
- Laitinen, Arto & Sandis,Constantine (eds.), 2010. Hegel on Action. Palgrave Macmillan.
Phenomenology of Spirit
- Stern, Robert, 2002. Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-21788-1. An introduction for students.
- Cohen, Joseph, 2007. Le sacrifice de Hegel. (In French language). Paris, Galilée. An extensive study of the question of sacrifice in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
- Braver, Lee. A Thing of This World: a History of Continental Anti-Realism. Northwestern University Press: 2007. ISBN 978-0-8101-2380-9 This study covers Hegel's Phenomenology and its contribution to the history of Continental Anti-Realism.
- Doull, James (2000). "Hegel's "Phenomenology" and Postmodern Thought". Animus 5. . http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/animus/Articles/Volume%205/doull5a.pdf. Retrieved August 9, 2011.
- Doull, James; Jackson, F.L. (2003). "The Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit". Animus 8. . http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/animus/Articles/Supplementa/jackson5addendum.pdf. Retrieved August 17, 2011.
- Hyppolite, Jean, 1946. Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de l'esprit. Paris: Aubier. Eng. tr. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman as Genesis and Structure of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit", Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-8101-0594-2. A classic commentary.
- Kojève, Alexandre, 1947. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Paris: Gallimard. Eng. tr. James H. Nichols, Jr., as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Basic Books, 1969. ISBN 0-8014-9203-3 Influential European reading of Hegel.
- Solomon, Robert C., 1983. In the Spirit of Hegel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Harris, H. S., 1995. Hegel: Phenomenology and System. Indianapolis: Hackett. A distillation of the author's monumental two-volume commentary Hegel's Ladder.
- Westphal, Kenneth R., 2003. Hegel's Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Indianapolis: Hackett. ISBN 0-87220-645-9
- Russon, John, 2004. Reading Hegel's Phenomenology. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-21692-3.
- Bristow, William, 2007. Hegel and the Transformation of Philosophical Critique. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-929064-4
- Kalkavage, Peter, 2007. The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books. ISBN 978-1-58988-037-5. This work provides insights on Hegel's complex work as a whole as well as serving as a sure guide for every chapter and for virtually every paragraph.
- Scruton, Roger, "Understanding Hegel" in The Philosopher on Dover Beach, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1990. ISBN 0-85635-857-6
- Burbidge, John, 2006. The Logic of Hegel's Logic: An Introduction. Broadview Press. ISBN 1-55111-633-2
- De Boer, Karin, 2010. On Hegel: The Sway of the Negative. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0230247547
- Hartnack, Justus, 1998. An Introduction to Hegel's Logic. Indianapolis: Hackett. ISBN 0-87220-424-3
- Houlgate, Stephen, 2005. The Opening of Hegel's Logic: From Being to Infinity. Purdue University Press. ISBN 1-55753-257-5
- Rinaldi, Giacomo, 1992. A History and Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. ISBN 0-7734-9509-6
- Schäfer, Rainer, 2001. Die Dialektik und ihre besonderen Formen in Hegels Logik. Hamburg/Meiner. ISBN 3-7873-1585-3.
- Wallace, Robert M., 2005. Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-84484-3. Through a detailed analysis of Hegel's Science of Logic, Wallace shows how Hegel contributes to the broadly Platonic tradition of philosophy that includes Aristotle, Plotinus, and Kant. In the course of doing this, Wallace defends Hegel against major critiques, including the one presented by Charles Taylor in his Hegel.
- Winfield, Richard Dien, 2006. From Concept to Objectivity: Thinking Through Hegel's Subjective Logic. Ashgate. ISBN 0-7546-5536-9.jdj
- Avineri, Shlomo, 1974. Hegel's Theory of the Modern State. Cambridge University Press. Best introduction to Hegel's political philosophy.
- Kierans, Kenneth (2008). "'Absolute Negativity': Community and Freedom in Hegel's Philosophy of Right". Animus 12. . http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/animus/Articles/Volume%2012/Kierans12.pdf. Retrieved August 17, 2011.
- Ritter, Joachim, 1984. Hegel and the French Revolution. MIT Press.
- Riedel, Manfred, 1984. Between Tradition and Revolution: The Hegelian Transformation of Political Philosophy, Cambridge.
- Marcuse, Herbert, 1941. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. An introduction to the philosophy of Hegel, devoted to debunking the conception that Hegel's work included in nuce the Fascist totalitarianism of National Socialism; the negation of philosophy through historical materialism.
- Rose, Gillian, 1981. Hegel Contra Sociology. Athlone Press. ISBN 0-485-12036-4.
- Scruton, Roger, "Hegel as a conservative thinker" in The Philosopher on Dover Beach, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1990. ISBN 0-85635-857-6
- Moggach, Douglas. 2006. "Introduction: Hegelianism, Republicanism and Modernity", The New Hegelians edited by Douglas Moggach, Cambridge University Press.
- Bungay, Stephen, 1987. Beauty and Truth. A Study of Hegel's Aesthetics. New York.
- Danto, Arthur Coleman, 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. Columbia University Press.
- Desmond, William, 1986. Art and the Absolute. Albany (New York).
- Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie, Einführung in Hegel's Ästhetik, Wilhelm Fink (German).
- Mark Jarzombek, "The Cunning of Architecture's Reason," Footprint (#1, Autumn 2007), pp. 31–46.
- Maker, W. (ed.), 2000. Hegel and Aesthetics. New York.
- Olivier, Alain P., 2003. Hegel et la Musique. Paris (French).
- Roche, Mark-William, 1998. Tragedy and Comedy. A Systematic Study and a Critique of Hegel. Albany. New York.
- Winfield, Richard Dien, 1996. Stylistics. Rethinking the Artforms after Hegel. Albany, Suny Press.
- Desmond, William, 2003. Hegel's God: A Counterfeit Double?. Ashgate. ISBN 0-7546-0565-5
- O'Regan, Cyril, 1994. The Heterodox Hegel. State University of New York Press, Albany. ISBN 0-7914-2006-X. The most authoritative work to date on Hegel's philosophy of religion.
- Cohen, Joseph, 2005. Le spectre juif de Hegel (in French language); Preface by Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris, Galilée.An extensive study of the Jewish question in Hegel's Early Theological Writings.
- Dickey, Laurence, 1987. Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-33035-1. A fascinating account of how "Hegel became Hegel", using the guiding hypothesis that Hegel "was basically a theologian manqué".
- Fackenheim, E. The Religious Dimension in Hegel's Thought. University of Chicago Press. 0226233502.
- Rocker, Stephen, 1995. Hegel's Rational Religion: The Validity of Hegel's Argument for the Identity in Content of Absolute Religion and Absolute Philosophy. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
- Andrew Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith: Divided brain, atoning spirit (London, T & T Clark, 2011).
Hegel's reputation
- Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2: Hegel and Marx. An influential attack on Hegel.
- Stewart, Jon, ed., 1996. The Hegel Myths and Legends. Northwestern University Press.
Comparative studies
Peter Henrici. Hegel und Blondel: Eine Untersuchung uber Form und Sinn der Dialektik in der 'Phanomenologie des Geistes' und der ersten 'Action'. Pullach bei Munchen: Berchmanskollege, 1958.
Siemens, R. (1997). The problem of modern poverty: significant congruences between Hegel's and George's theoretical conceptions. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 56, 617-637. (Note: A comparison between Hegel and Henry George.)
See also
- Thesis, antithesis, synthesis
- Political consciousness
- The Secret of Hegel
- Emil Fackenheim
- Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus
- African Uplands
|Constructs such as ibid., loc. cit. and idem are discouraged for footnotes, as they are easily broken. Please improve this article by replacing them with named references (quick guide), or an abbreviated title. (March 2010)
- ↑ Butler, Judith, Subjects of desire: Hegelian reflections in twentieth-century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987)
- ↑ "One of the few things on which the analysts, pragmatists, and existentialists agree with the dialectical theologians is that Hegel is to be repudiated: their attitude toward Kant, Aristotle, Plato, and the other great philosophers is not at all unanimous even within each movement; but opposition to Hegel is part of the platform of all four, and of the Marxists, too." Walter Kaufmann, "The Hegel Myth and Its Method", in From Shakespeare to Existentialism: Studies in Poetry, Religion, and Philosophy by Walter Kaufmann, Beacon Press, Boston 1959, page 88-119
- ↑ Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography, pp. 2-3; p. 745.
- ↑ Ibid., 3, incorrectly gives the date as September 20, 1781, and describes Hegel as aged eleven. Cf. the index to Pinkard's book and his "Chronology of Hegel's Life", which correctly give the date as 1783 (pp. 773, 745); see also German Wikipedia.
- ↑ Ibid., 4.
- ↑ Ibid., 80.
- ↑ Ibid., 223.
- ↑ Ibid., 224-5.
- ↑ Ibid., 228.
- ↑ Ibid., 192.
- ↑ Ibid., 238.
- ↑ Ibid., 337.
- ↑ Ibid., 354-5.
- ↑ Ibid., 356.
- ↑ Ibid., 658-9.
- ↑ Norman Davies, Europe: A history p. 687
- ↑ Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography, p. 548.
- ↑ par. 378
- ↑ See Science of Logic, trans. Miller [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1989], pp. 133-136 and 138, top
- ↑ Ibid., 111
- ↑ Ibid., 145
- ↑ See Ibid., 146, top
- ↑ Stefan Gruner: "Hegel's Aether Doctrine", VDM Publ., 2010, ISBN 978-3-639-28451-5
- ↑ Etext of Philosophy of Right Hegel, 1827 (translated by Dyde, 1897)
- ↑ Pelczynski, A.Z.; 1984; 'The Significane of Hegel's speration of the state and civil society' pp1-13 in Pelczynski, A.Z. (ed.); 1984; The State and Civil Society; Cambridge University Press
- ↑ 26.0 26.1 Zaleski, Pawel (2008). "Tocqueville on Civilian Society. A Romantic Vision of the Dichotomic Structure of Social Reality". Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte (Felix Meiner Verlag) 50.
- ↑ ibid
- ↑ Hegel, G. W. F.. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. URL accessed on 2008-07-01.
- ↑ Hartnack, Justus; Lars Aagaard-Mogensen, Translator (1998). An Introduction to Hegel's Logic. Hackett Publishing. pp. 16–17. . Hartnack quotes Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy Volume I.
- ↑ Hegel, G. W. F.. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. URL accessed on 2008-07-01.
- ↑ Copleston, Frederick Charles (2003). A History of Philosophy: Volume 7: 18th and 19th century German philosophy. Continuum International Publishing Group. Chapter X. .
- ↑ The notable Introduction to Philosophy of History expresses the historical aspects of the dialectic.
- ↑ Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, translated by David E. Green, New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.
- ↑ Benedetto Croce, Guide to Aesthetics, Translated by Patrick Romanell, "Translator's Introduction", The Library of Liberal Arts, The Bobbs–Merrill Co., Inc., 1965
- ↑ Slavoj Žižek, The Return to Hegel. URL accessed on 2011-07-08.
- ↑ B.Russell, History of western philosophy, pg 701 chapter 22, paragraph 1
- ↑ On the Basis of Morality
- ↑ Søren Kierkegaard Concluding Unscientific Postscriptt
- ↑ Ludwig Boltzmann, Theoretical physics and philosophical problems: Selected writings, p. 155, D. Reidel, 1974, ISBN 90-277-0250-0
- ↑ (See for instance Walter Kaufmann 1959, The Hegel Myth and Its Method)
- ↑ Berlin, Isaiah, Freedom and Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (Princeton University Press, 2003)
Further reading
- Beiser, F.. Hegel (The Routledge Philosophers). New York: Routledge, 2005.
- Pinkard, Terry. Hegel: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
External links
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Template:Sep entry
- Hegel page in 'The History Guide'
- Hegel.net - freely available resources (under the GNU FDL)
- « Der Instinkt der Vernünftigkeit » and other texts - Works on Hegel in Université du Québec site (in French)
- Hegel : On Christianity : Early Theological Writings on archive.org
- Hegel & Haiti by Susan Buck-Morss, 2000
- Works by or about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in libraries (WorldCat Wp→ catalog)
- Lowenberg J., (1913) "The Life of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel". in German classics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. New York: German Publication Society.
- Hegel, as the National Philosopher of Germany (1874) Karl Rosenkranz, Granville Stanley Hall, William Torrey Harris, Gray, Baker & Co. 1874
- Hegel : The Encyclopaedia Logic (with the Zusatze) tr. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris, 1991.
Hegel's texts online
- Works by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel at Project Gutenberg Wp→
- Philosophy of History Introduction
- Hegel's The Philosophy of Right
- Hegel's The Philosophy of History
- Hegel by HyperText, reference archive on Marxists.org
- Phenomenology of Spirit. translated by Terry Pinkard
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text:
Saturday, December 1, 2007
New Fence, New Border
I'm tight with a dollar (I steal dead leaves, for crying out loud) so the thought of replacing 150 feet of fence that was not in danger of imminent collapse seemed wasteful. On the other hand, how much longer would it be before the rest of it needed replacing? Plus, our old fence had only one gate, which was conveniently placed as far as possible from the crawl space/toolshed, which meant that if I wanted to work in the front yard, I had to either drag my implements all the way around, or toss them over the fence and hope no one was standing on the other side. (The neighbors have small children and I have a pitchfork, so there was the potential for an awkward situation...)
Aesthetics and convenience won out over money, and now we have a brand new fence that cost slightly less than an organ transplant, but does look fine.
For the last month or so, I've been expanding my border along the fence line. Just for fun, I dug out my photos from July 2005, before I planted anything, to compare with how it looks today. Check it out below.
15 comments:
- Lisa at Greenbow said...
Your fence is marvelous and your wider beds are great. I can't wait to see everything next spring and summer. It will fill in and look gorgeous. It is good that the neighbors will be safe with you mucking around the garden.
- December 1, 2007 at 10:59 PM
- Christine said...
I like the new, wavy edged beds. I also can't wait to see how it looks next year.
- December 1, 2007 at 11:22 PM
- Gina said...
hey david! that fence is awesome! and i love love love the new wider beds! your yard looks HUGE.
- December 2, 2007 at 12:25 AM
- Carolyn gail said...
Congratulations on your new fence. I had to do the same thing last year.
Love the curvaceous new beds. Hope you're planning a lot of background shrubs and vines to soften the fence?
Are those evergreens Alberta Spruce ?
I'm envious of your large yard but I know it's going to take a lot of sweat and greenbbacks to fill up.
Some inexpensive deciduous shrubs to consider if you have sun : Wiegela, Forsythia, Dwarf Korean lilac, Knockout roses, and dwarf magnolia.
- December 2, 2007 at 8:06 AM
- David in Greensboro, NC said...
Thanks Lisa! I can't wait either!
Thanks Christine. I spent many hours moving the hose around working on the configuration.
Thank you, Gina. Yeah, it's pretty big--I used to think too big when it was all grass.
Thanks CG. Oh yes, I'm planning to have a mixed border all along the fence--you see the evergreens already (Arborvitae. I'm working on a "native plant/bird friendly" border and have some arrowwood viburnums and American cranberry (v. tribolum). And in the "Great Minds Think Alike" category, I have some forsythia and weigela that I rooted earlier this year--spring, then summer flowers!
I'm not familiar with Dwarf Korean Lilacs, but I looked them up on your suggestion and I think I may have to find one. The blooms are beautiful, and according to my sources, very fragrant!
Thanks for the suggestions!
- December 2, 2007 at 7:23 PM
I just finished building 50' of fence from junk I found at the curb. And I'm competing with you for stealing those dead leaves. I steal grass cuttings as well.
-Billy The Blogging Poet
- December 2, 2007 at 10:55 PM
- Mary said...
What a huge difference the new fence makes. And I give you credit for your designing skills on the garden. I'll eager to see what springtime brings to you!
- December 3, 2007 at 9:22 PM
- Robin's Nesting Place said...
The new fence looks great! What a difference it makes. The new beds look great too.
- December 5, 2007 at 7:59 PM
- Catherine said...
Your new fence looks wonderful, and I'm know your extended border will too! ~Look forward to seeing it next year!! :)
- December 5, 2007 at 8:45 PM
- David in Greensboro, NC said...
Hey Billy! Just don't be stealing 'em from my neighborhood. I've got dibs!
Mary, Robin, and Catherine--Thanks. I'm counting the days till spring myself!
- December 9, 2007 at 10:07 PM
- Mr. McGregor's Daughter said...
I have to replace my fence next spring (actually, I should have replaced it last spring). My fence looks like your old fence, plain stockade. I'm inspired by your new scalloped fencing. I'm just not sure how it would look because my ground slopes. BTW - you should link this post with Gardening Gone Wild's Garden Blogger's Design Workshop for December.
- December 11, 2007 at 8:26 AM
- David in Greensboro, NC said...
Hi Mr. M's Daughter, Our yard has a bit of a slope. We wanted the scallops because the backyard is so rectilinear that it looks like a football field. I thought the scallops would echo the curves in the beds and soften it up. Plus, it dips down to 5 1/2 feet in height, so you don't feel so walled in. Thanks for the tip about Gardening Gone Wild. I added a link there.
- December 11, 2007 at 9:01 PM
A beautiful new fence, David, and worth every cent. What a terrific backdrop for those big borders! Thanks for sharing your photos, and for participating in the Garden Bloggers' Design Workshop.
- December 12, 2007 at 8:00 AM
- jim said...
Stealing leaves? You are cheap. They fall off trees at no cost, you know.
Fence looks great. I'm in a tight urban setting and I'm envious of your "back forty."
Fence looks great. Any plans for adding color to it with stain?
- January 1, 2008 at 2:26 PM
- Less is More said...
hi good day nice post you have . great . i hope you have a post about garden spinner or other garden and home accessories , im interested on this i hope you can help me . thank you
- September 22, 2010 at 9:57 PM

subset: commoncrawl


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Olympic Steel Expanding All Over
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Saturday, October 1, 2011
National metal-service center Olympic Steel, Inc., Cleveland, OH, has announced plans to take on nearly 300,000 sq. ft. of additional warehouse, processing and office space throughout North America. Included is the purchase of the U.S. Steel site in Gary, IN, (177,000 sq. ft.) to house a new temper mill and cut-to-length line, to become operational by year-end 2011. The firm also will lease 43,000 sq. ft. of warehouse space in Kansas City, MO; 8000 sq. ft. in Quincy, WA; 57,000 sq. ft. in Minneapolis, MN; and 15,000 sq. ft. in Monterrey, Mexico.
See also: Olympic Steel
Related Enterprise Zones: Materials/Coatings
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U.S. Role in Saddams Execution Limited to Transport, General Says
|By Gerry J. Gilmore
American Forces Press Service
|WASHINGTON, Jan. 3, 2007 U.S. involvement in the Dec. 29 execution of Saddam Hussein amounted to providing helicopter transport at the request of the Iraqi government, a U.S. military spokesman said in Baghdad today.
Caldwell explained that while the U.S. military had maintained physical control over Saddam during his incarceration, the Iraqi government had legal custody of the deposed dictator throughout that time. Whenever transport was required to bring Saddam to his courtroom appearances, for example the U.S. military provided the transport at the request of the Iraqi government.
When the Iraqi government asked that Saddam be transported to his execution site, the general said, normal transport procedures were followed.
I guess the most important thing to know is that we continued operating just as we always have, dealing with the logistics, specifically both the security and the transportation of Saddam; that is, the routine matter that we've been doing ever since we took physical control of him, Caldwell said.
After U.S. military police delivered Saddam to a holding room near the execution site at a Baghdad prison and appropriate legal paperwork was signed, American authorities had absolutely nothing to do with any of the (execution) procedures or any of the control mechanisms or anything from that point forward, Caldwell said.
News reports say Saddam was taunted by some observers just before he was hanged and that others present may have taken cell-phone-video images of the execution. Some of that purported video has circulated on the Internet and portions of it have been broadcast by media outlets. The Iraqi government has called for an investigation of the matter, Caldwell said. News reports today say an Iraqi official has been arrested for allegedly taking images of the execution with a cell phone camera.
We had absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the facility where the execution took place, Caldwell emphasized. We were not involved in any search of any people, we had nobody present, we did not dictate any requirements that had to be followed. The multinational force had absolutely no direct involvement with that whatsoever.
After the execution, Caldwell said, the Iraqi government requested U.S. helicopter support to fly some Iraqis from Baghdad to Tikrit. The Iraqis loaded Saddams body into a helicopter, he said, and the former dictators remains and they were transported north.
Caldwell acknowledged that coalition officials would not have made all the same decisions regarding the execution, but pointed out that those decisions were the Iraqi governments to make. This is a sovereign nation; they made the decisions they made, he said. But we, as a coalition force, would have done it differently.
Saddam was tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity by an Iraqi court. An appeals court upheld the former dictators conviction and death sentence for his complicity in the murder of 148 people living in the Iraqi city of Dujail in 1982.


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Vehicles flooded by Hurricane Sandy sold in metro
Auto fraud investigators warn buyers to do research
Buyer beware. Vehicles damaged by the effects of Hurricane Sandy arrived in the Omaha metro in recent weeks.
The KETV NewsWatch 7 I-Team found a handful of vehicles, listed as total losses and flood-damaged on CARFAX, in the possession of an Omaha car dealer. Each vehicle was originally titled to owners on Long Island in New York.
The I-Team is withholding the name of the dealer at the request of auto fraud investigators with the Nebraska State Patrol.
They said it is not illegal to sell flood-damaged vehicles, but said it's unethical.
"In my opinion, when a vehicle is flood-damaged from salt water, it should obtain a junk title, and that should kill that vehicle, and never be back on the road," investigator Gene True said.
He said flood-damaged vehicles can appear cosmetically clean, but he said over time they rust in places most vehicles do not. And he said they suffer major electrical problems since water-soaked wires can become brittle.
"Your lights could go out, and there it is midnight, no light," he said of the potential deadly consequences.
True said flood-damaged vehicles often arrive in Nebraska with salvage titles, through large insurance company auctions. Salvage vehicles are illegal to drive on Nebraska roads.
However, "previously salvage" vehicles are legal. The I-Team learned the mandatory state inspection used to obtain that distinction is easy since the inspectors are not mechanics. They work for local law enforcement.
Jason Staley, an inspector with the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, said he'd look for signs of major body damage, major missing components, or mismatched vehicle identification numbers.
Investigator True urged used car buyers to do their homework, saying they should ask a dealer to see the vehicle's title and a CARFAX report. He also said they should have a trusted, third-party mechanic inspect the vehicle before they purchase it.
"They may find problems that law enforcement didn't find," True said.


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ASTRO Chile
Even half a world apart and across people of different languages and cultures, the most effective ways to teach concepts in science is hands-on with discussion following. Since the Fall of 2002, NOAO North in Tucson & NOAO South in Chile have held videoconference workshops for teachers and for students in Tucson, AZ, and La Serena, Chile. The teachers and students exchanged methods and ideas about how to teach and learn about light and color, various physics activities, light pollution monitoring, lunar eclipse activities and a remote sensing activity on the Earth and on Mars. The workshops are held in Spanish and English and are facilitated by the bilingual science teachers from the Tucson area and the teachers from Chile. The collaboration, dubbed ASTRO-Chile, merges the teaching strategies and techniques from both countries into a cross-cultural exchange.
- The Nature of Light
- Light Pollution Projects
- Lunar Eclipse Projects
- More Light Pollution Projects
- Family ASTRO in South America
- Remote Sensing of the Earth
- Remote Sensing of Mars
Contact the staff of ASTRO-Chile:Connie Walker, Tucson Site Director
520-318-8535, email@example.com
Kathie Coil, EPO Program Coordinator
520-318-8230, email@example.com


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The purpose for conducting Military Funeral Honors is to honor the veteran, and to support his or her family by providing those honors. Our goal is to ensure that all funeral missions are completed to standard, and that they leave a positive and memorable memory for the veteran's family. Funeral Directors usually assist the family with requesting honors. However, the information below may help answer some of your questions.
Veterans: All eligible veterans (those who are Honorably Discharged) are entitled to a basic military honors. This includes a two or three Soldier detail, the playing of Taps, the folding of the Flag, and the presentation of the Flag to the next-of-kin.
Retirees: Retirees are entitled to a nine-Soldier detail. This detail is similar to the basic military honors, but includes a firing party.
Medal of Honor Recipients, Active Duty Deaths, and KIAs: These honors include a six-Soldier casket carry and flag fold, and a seven-Soldier firing party.
If you have any questions regarding these services, please check our FAQs page for a quick answer. You may also call our headquarters office on the Contact Us page.


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Over the years, Keith McCarthy has become used to a certain way of doing things on his personal computers, which, like most others on the planet, have long run on
But last week, when he got his hands on a laptop running the newest version of Windows for the first time, Mr. McCarthy was flummoxed.
Many of the familiar signposts from PCs of yore are gone in Microsoft's new software, Windows 8, like the Start button for getting to programs and the drop-down menus that list their functions.
It took Mr. McCarthy several minutes just to figure out how to compose an e-mail message in Windows 8, which has a stripped-down look and on-screen buttons that at times resemble the runic assembly instructions for
"It made me feel like the biggest amateur computer user ever," said Mr. McCarthy, 59, a copywriter in New York.Continue reading the main story
Windows, which has more than a billion users around the world, is getting a radical makeover, a rare move for a product with such vast reach. The new design is likely to cause some head-scratching for those who buy the latest machines when Windows 8 goes on sale this Friday.
To Microsoft and early fans of Windows 8, the software is a fresh, bold reinvention of the operating system for an era of touch-screen devices like the iPad, which are reshaping computing. Microsoft needs the software to succeed so it can restore some of its fading relevance after years of watching the likes of
To its detractors, though, Windows 8 is a renovation gone wrong, one that will needlessly force people to relearn how they use a device every bit as common as a microwave oven.
"I don't think any user was asking for that," said John Ludwig, a former Microsoft executive who worked on Windows and is now a venture capitalist in the
Mr. Ludwig said Microsoft's strategy was risky, but it had to do something to improve its chances in the mobile business: "Doing nothing was a strategy that was sure to fail."
Little about the new Windows will look familiar to those who have used older versions. The Start screen, a kind of main menu, is dominated by a colorful grid of rectangles and squares that users can tap with a finger or click with a mouse to start applications. Many of these so-called live tiles constantly flicker with new information piped in from the Internet, like news headlines and
What is harder to find are many of the conventions that have been a part of PCs since most people began using them, like the strip of icons at the bottom of the screen for jumping between applications. The mail and calendar programs are starkly minimalist. It is as if an automaker hid the speedometer, turn signals and gear shift in its cars, and told drivers to tap their dashboards to reveal those functions. There is a more conventional "desktop" mode for running Microsoft Office and older programs, though there is no way to permanently switch to it.
Microsoft knew in the summer of 2009 that it wanted to shake up Windows. It held focus groups and showed people prototypes of the tile interface and its live updates.
"We would get this delightful reaction of people who would say, 'This is so great, and it has Office too,' " said Jensen Harris, Microsoft's director of program management for the Windows user experience.
Sixteen million people have been using early versions of the software. The boldness of the changes has delighted some users, who say they believe that for the first time, the company is taking greater creative risks than its more celebrated rival, Apple.
"I think it's functional, clean," said Andries van Dam, a pioneer in computer graphics and a
Younger users may be more likely to embrace the new approach. Joanna Lin, 23, who works in sales and marketing for a hotel chain in New York, said she was impressed with the software. "The feeling was very fluid," said Ms. Lin, who was the most enthusiastic of five people that
But the product is a major gamble for Microsoft, a company whose clout in the technology industry has been waning. The PC business, which generates much of Microsoft's revenue, is in a severe slump as newer products like smartphones and tablets take more dollars from peoples' wallets.
To help it gain traction in the mobile market, Microsoft made Windows 8 a one-size-fits-all operating system for touch-screen tablets, conventional computers with keyboards and mice, and newer devices that combine elements of both. (Confusingly, Microsoft is also introducing a separate but similar operating system, Windows RT, that cannot run older programs.)
Apple took the opposite approach with the Mac and mobile devices like the iPad, which have distinct interfaces, albeit with some shared technologies.
Jakob Nielsen, a user interface expert at the Nielsen Norman Group, conducted tests with four people who used a traditional computer running Windows 8 and found that they had "a lot of struggles" with the new design. Mr. Nielsen said they appeared to become especially confused when shifting back and forth between the modern Windows 8 mode and the desktop mode.
Mr. Nielsen said Windows 8 was more suitable for tablet computers with their smaller displays, but it was not helpful for workers who needed to have lots of applications visible at once.
"I just think when it comes to the traditional customer base, the office computer user, they're essentially being thrown under the bus," Mr. Nielsen said.
Microsoft disputes this idea. Mr. Harris said most test users did not have trouble juggling the two modes — and regardless, workers were more likely to operate in desktop mode if they wanted to see many applications simultaneously.
Microsoft is convinced that most people will quickly become accustomed to Windows 8. But to help ease the transition, the software offers tutorials when it is first started up. And Microsoft is spending more than $500 million on a marketing campaign that is partly intended to familiarize people with the new design.
Mr. Harris said the company needed to modernize Windows for the way people use computers today: "We're not surprised people have a strong reaction to it."Continue reading the main story


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In consultation with the Ministry of Justice the Commission is currently working towards finalising Terms of Reference. Once agreed, the Terms of Reference will be published on this page.
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Use the search filters below to find particular projects. For more information on how we work see how we conduct projects.
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For nearly 30 years the Law Commission has been engaged in reforming the law of evidence in New Zealand.
In August 1989 the Minister of Justice asked the Commission to review all evidence law to make it as clear, simple and accessible as...
The declaratory judgment is an important judicial remedy. It provides an efficient and effective means by which parties can clarify and establish their legal rights and obligations, without the need for further remedies. There is, however,...
The objective of the law of contempt of court is to protect the integrity of the justice system and a defendant's right to a fair trial. However, the law is vague in scope, uses outdated language and concepts, and is inaccessible to the New...
Section 202(1) of the Evidence Act required the Commission to report to the Minister of Justice on the following matters:
(a) the operation of the provisions of the Act since its commencement;
(b) whether those provisions should be...
The ability of citizens to bring civil legal proceedings against the Crown and its servants is an important part of New Zealand's constitution, and is protected by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. The Crown Proceedings Act 1950 is the...
On this project, the Law Commission undertook a first principles review of the Burial and Cremation Act 1964. The Act's primary purpose is to ensure provision is made for the burial of the dead in a controlled and respectful manner which meets...
This project arose from the Commission's recommendation in their Report, Disclosure to Court of Defendants' Previous Convictions, Similar Offending, and Bad Character (R103, 2008). The Commission recommended that Government should...
This project reviews the laws that determine how security sensitive information should be dealt with in court proceedings. The review looks at how to protect information that may prejudice New Zealand's security. It also considers whether the...
In 2011, the Law Commission was asked to review the use of pecuniary penalties as a regulatory tool. These are financial penalties that policymakers are increasingly opting to use in place of criminal sanctions, to punish and deter misconduct in...


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Let's see, our current T-sec was at the center of the maelstrom as Chairman of the New York Fed that delivered the financial crisis of 2008. We see our next T-sec comes from the heart of the failure of Citigroup that was bailed out by the taxpayer at the behest of the Fed. How great is this financial industry where all the big players seem to fail up? Will we never learn?
Treasury Gets a Citibanker
From Wall Street failure to the pinnacle of finance in four short years. …Like the current Treasury secretary and fellow Rubin protégé Timothy Geithner, Mr. Lew knows bureaucratic power.
There was a time when you had to be successful on Wall Street to become secretary of the Treasury. Now along comes presidential nominee Jack Lew, whose only business credential is a stint at the most troubled too-big-to-fail bank.
During the darkest days of the financial crisis Mr. Lew served as the chief operating officer of Citigroup's Alternative Investments unit (CAI). When Mr. Lew took this job in January 2008, the unit was already infamous for overseeing "structured investment vehicles" that hid mortgage risks outside Citi's balance sheet. It also housed internal hedge funds that were in the process of imploding.
CAI no longer exists. At the end of Mr. Lew's first quarter on the job, the unit reported a $358 million loss. Things got much worse after that but Citi stopped breaking out CAI results in its earnings releases. The unit was eventually shuttered and many of its assets were sold.
There probably weren't many laughs at Citi during the market panic in 2008. But if someone had said that a CAI executive would be the secretary of the Treasury within five years, the line would have brought the house down. That year the house almost really did come down, thanks to horrendous mortgage bets at CAI and other parts of Citigroup. The bank survived only with a series of taxpayer bailouts that provided $45 billion in cash, taxpayer guarantees on more than $300 billion of risky assets, tens of billions more in federal guarantees on Citi debt, plus cheap loans from the Federal Reserve.
Defenders of Mr. Lew say that by the time he showed up at CAI most of the bad decisions had already been made. But even if Mr. Lew didn't create the mess, the taxpayers who ended up underwriting his seven-figure compensation might want to know what exactly he was doing to clean it up. All we can find is a list of things that Mr. Lew and his allies claim he was not responsible for.
It might also be instructive to learn what Mr. Lew was thinking as he took the Citi job. Did he understand that he was sailing into an iceberg, or did he believe that the unit was putting its problems of 2007 behind it? This is important because, thanks to the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, it is now the job of the Treasury secretary to spot financial icebergs.
If confirmed, Mr. Lew will chair the Financial Stability Oversight Council, responsible for identifying and addressing "systemic risks" to the financial system. It's hard to believe he can competently perform this task if his only experience in a similar situation ended in failure.
There are other questions. In 2004 the student newspaper at New York University, where Mr. Lew was working at the time, reported on a discussion he held with students. According to NYU's Washington Square News, Mr. Lew said he had turned down "attractive" banking jobs because he wanted to "do something bigger." NYU "mattered a lot more to me than whether or not consumer loans are up or down," he added.
Citi obviously made an offer attractive enough for Mr. Lew to get over the fact that he didn't care about consumer credit markets. But a Treasury secretary should care.
Speaking of consumers, the toughest questions for Mr. Lew may relate to his previous gig at Citi. Before he took the top operating job at the CAI division, he held the same job at Citi's Global Wealth Management division, beginning in July 2006. This means he likely oversaw, among other functions, the division's legal affairs. And during that time his division was creating one very big legal headache for Citigroup, one that continues to this day.
You see, while Mr. Lew's future colleagues at the CAI division were cooking up toxic investments, some of his Global Wealth Management colleagues were feeding them to investors. A lot of those investors later felt they'd been misled about the risks in Citi hedge funds and some Citi employees agreed, sparking an internal debate at Citi, according to reporting in this newspaper.
The funds invested in mortgage-backed securities and other instruments and in some cases borrowed more than $8 for every dollar invested, a risky way to seek high returns. In 2008 the bank decided to spend $250 million to compensate investors, but that didn't begin to cover the losses.
According to a 2012 USA Today report, the bank has paid out at least $85 million in settlements and arbitration awards, not including dozens of confidential agreements. We're told that the settlement dollars will keep flowing this year as more cases are resolved. Citigroup has maintained that its disclosures were adequate. What was Mr. Lew's opinion in these internal debates?
A former colleague of Mr. Lew's argues that since he had no role in sales, marketing or managing investments, this one isn't his fault either. But that raises the question of whether Mr. Lew was merely holding down a non-job reserved for those with political juice. He was brought into Citi by his patron and Clinton Administration colleague, Robert Rubin.
When it comes to pay for non-performance and monetizing Beltway status, Mr. Rubin set Wall Street's unofficial world records. Over roughly a decade Citigroup shareholders paid the former Treasury secretary more than $115 million, though Citi said he had "no line responsibilities." Unaccountable for any business results, Mr. Rubin nevertheless advised those who were accountable to take on more risk. Citi managers tragically followed his advice.
Without a famous name, Jack Lew couldn't make Rubin money. But after a career as a government official and then a university administrator, he probably enjoyed making more than $1 million a year. Not bad considering the bank was collapsing.
The fact that almost no one seems to know what exactly he did for that paycheck underlines the fact that Mr. Lew comes to this job not as an expert or practitioner in financial markets, but as a political actor. Like the current Treasury secretary and fellow Rubin protégé Timothy Geithner, Mr. Lew knows bureaucratic power.
Mr. Geithner succeeded in bailing out Citigroup and prevailed over Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chairman Sheila Bair. Like these columns, Ms. Bair wanted to clean out Citi's management and asked her fellow regulators to consider putting it into receivership. In her recent memoir, Ms. Bair writes that when she suggested in early 2009 that Citi's private investors should take losses before the company received additional government assistance, "that was a nonstarter for Tim."
Now an alum from this most political of banks will chair the financial risk council and decide how failing firms are resolved. The next time Citi gets in trouble, who wants to bet against help from Washington?
The greatest irony is that given Mr. Lew's crisis-era resumé, he bears a remarkable resemblance to the bankers who President Obama says created the financial crisis and deserve federal investigation. But apparently there's an exception as long as your liberal intentions are noble and you're a loyal Democrat. Then you can get rich at one of Wall Street's biggest failures and end up running the entire financial system.


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Weekly Wire: the Global Forum
These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.
Financial Task Force
World Bank Unveils New Transparency Initiative
"Last week, the World Bank unveiled a major initiative to make their funding more transparent. Through the new World Bank Finances portal, vast amounts of information about the inner workings of the Bank's finances are now made easily accessible. This includes information about specific funds that members are supporting, and the disbursement and repayment status of thousands of projects around the world. Tools are provided to allow members of the public to comment on specific elements of the data, as well as to download datasets specifically catered to their needs. The data is remarkably up-to-date, often covering information as recent as June 2011." READ MORE


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SAN JOSE, Calif. — Dec. 5, 2012 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the expansion of its board of directors from 12 to 13 members, and the addition of a new board member, effective Dec. 4, 2012.
Joining Adobe's board is Kelly J. Barlow, a partner with ValueAct Capital who also serves on the board of directors of KAR Auction Services, Inc. He previously served on the boards of directors of Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Inc. and SIRVA, Inc.
"We are pleased that Kelly has joined our board of directors," said John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, co-chairmen of the board, Adobe. "His experience and financial expertise will bring significant value to our board, and we look forward to adding a strong shareholder perspective."
"I'm pleased to join Adobe's board of directors," said Barlow. "It's an exciting time for Adobe as the company positions itself for long-term growth and leadership in digital media and digital marketing. I'm looking forward to working with the company's leadership team and the board of directors, and being part of the transformation of this iconic brand."
Barlow has been a partner of ValueAct Capital, a San Francisco based investment firm with over $8 billion under management, since 2003 and has led many of the fund's core investments. Prior to joining ValueAct, Barlow worked at EGM Capital, where he served primarily as portfolio manager. Prior to EGM, he worked at Wells Capital Management, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wells Fargo Bank. Barlow has a bachelor's degree from California State University, Chico and is a CFA charterholder.
About Adobe Systems Incorporated
Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.
View or download a printable version of this article. (PDF: 33k)
Jodi Sorensen
Adobe Systems Incorporated
Mike Saviage
Adobe Systems Incorporated