Abstract

Hegel scholars have been waiting two decades and a half for this book to appear. It contains the historico-critical edition of all unpublished papers written by Hegel from the end of the Frankfort to the end of the Bamberg period. Most importantly, it contains the first edition of two sets of until now unpublished manuscripts referring to the lectures given by Hegel at Jena on “Introduction to Philosophy” and “Logic and Metaphysics” in the 1801/02 Winter Term, and on the “Philosophy of Spirit” in the 1803 Summer Term that had been discovered by Eva Ziesche in the early 1970s. These fragments are a very important piece in the rather complicated history of Hegel’s development because they document the state of Hegel’s thought after the nonsystematic essays of the Frankfort period and before the turn toward subjectivity beginning with the Jenese lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit of the 1803/04 Winter Term. In those years Hegel was working at a metaphysics of substance that he was to give up as soon as he became aware that the foundation of dialectic lies in the subjective structure of the self. The fragments had been last accounted for by Karl Rosenkranz in his Hegel’s Leben, and were misplaced in the manuscript section of the Berlin State Library sometime afterward. The rediscovery of the fragments was made public by Eva Ziesche in 1975 in the Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung; and some passages of the fragments were reported in a seminal paper by Baum and Meist that appeared in 1977 in the Hegel-Studien under the title “Durch Philosophie leben lernen,” that is, to learn to live through philosophy. Unfortunately, for twenty-two long years the paper by Baum and Meist has remained the only source to inform about the content of this crucial stage of Hegelian thought; and this is too bad, because a lot of good research might have been produced had this edition appeared more timely.