Notes on Introduction to Philosophy -- Phil A201

William Jamison - Instructor

Lecture 10

Tenth lecture notes for Introduction to Philosophy:

Slide 1:

Georg Hegel 1770 -1831

1788-1793 theology student in Tübingen

fellow students Friedrich Hölderlin, and F. Schelling

1802 Hegel published his first philosophical work, The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy

1807 Hegel published his Phenomenology of Spirit

editor - newspaper in Bamberg

Slide 2:

1808-1816 headmaster and philosophy teacher at a "gymnasium" in Nuremberg, during which time he wrote and published his Science of Logic.

In 1816 he took up a chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg.

1818 the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, the most prestigious position in the German philosophical world.

Dies - 1831

Slide 3:

Self- Consciousness

Consciousness

sense certainty

perception

appearance and the supersensible world

Self-consciousness

For itself - the object of thought

In itself - the subject of thought

Stoicism, skepticism, the Unhappy Consciousness

Reason

Spirit

Explanation

Slide 4:

The Rational is the Real and the Real is the Rational

Hegel follows Kant seeking the conditions of rationality.

Kant had limited such conditions to "formal" structures of the mind, Hegel extended them to include aspects of historically and socially determined forms of embodied existence - i.e. culture.

Culture (as Geist) becomes what is rational.

Truth is truth for a culture.

Truth evolves as a culture evolves

Slide 5:

World Spirit

God is the root and end of all.

God is Spirit and Freedom

The world spirit is active and dynamic development.

Development takes place in dialectical mode.

The World Spirit realizes itself through History.

The will, self-interest and action of humans are the means by which Spirit realizes its goals.

World-historical heroes and peoples are the decisive forces of history.

Slide 6:

Spirit in history

"Spirit in history" describes different cultures in terms of their "spirits", constructing a sequence of progress.

The story of human progress is about the developing self-conscious of the universe/god itself.

Slide 7:

German idealism

The State is the end of history - the embodiment of Reason.

Philosophy is its own time raised to the level of thought.

Mind of God is actual only via the minds of his creations which serve as its vehicle. It is as bearers of this developing self-consciousness of God that those finitely-embodied inhabitants of the universe -- ourselves -- can be such "finite-infinites".

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