The Preface to Hegel's first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, lays the groundwork for all his other writing by explaining what is most innovative about Hegel's philosophy.This new translation combines readability with maximum precision, breaking Hegel's long sentences and simplifying their often complex structure. At the same time, it is more faithful to the original than any previous translation.The heart of the book is the detailed commentary, supported by an introductory essay. Together they offer a lucid and elegant explanation of the text and elucidate difficult issues in Hegel, making his claims and intentions intelligible to the beginner while offering interesting and original insights to the scholar and advanced student. The commentary often goes beyond the particular phrase in the text to provide systematic context and explain related topics in Hegel and his predecessors (including Kant, Spinoza, and Aristotle, as well as Fichte, Schelling, Holderlin, and others).The commentator refrains from playing down (as many interpreters do today) those aspects of Hegel's thought that are less acceptable in our time, and abstains from mixing his own philosophical preferences with his reading of Hegel's text. His approach is faithful to the historical Hegel while reconstructing Hegel's ideas within their own context."

    Originally published in English in 1910, Hegel proffers his unique viewpoint that knowledge is not separated from, nor outside of, absolute reality--but that knowledge is itself reality, & posits that reality is mental & spiritual. Volume I includes: On Scientific Knowledge in General. Intention & Method of the Argument of the Phenomenology. Consciousness & Self-Consciousness. [The Nature of] Free Concrete Mind: Reason. German philosopher GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL (1770-1831) was born in Stuttgart & studied at Tübingen, where his contemporaries included Schelling and the poet Hölderlin. As a philosophical disciple of Kant, Hegel was of the Idealist School of philosophers & remained an unparalleled influence on German philosophy throughout the 19th-century. Additional works by Hegel include: The Objective Logic (1812-13), The Subjective Logic (1816), Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciencies in Outline (1817), and Philosophy of Right (1821).

    Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1910. Excerpt: ... II Enlightenment * The peculiar object on which pure insight directs the active force of the notion is belief, this being a form of pure consciousness like itself and yet opposed to it in that element. But at the same time pure insight has a relation to the actual world, for, like belief, it is a return from the actual world into pure consciousness. We have first of all to see how its activity is constituted, as contrasted with the impure intentions and the perverted forms of insight found in the actual world, f We have touched already on the placid type of conscious life, which stands in contrast to this turmoil of alternate self-dissolution and self-evolution; it constitutes the aspect of pure insight and intention. This unperturbed consciousness, however, as we saw, has no special insight regarding the sphere of culture. The latter has itself rather the most painful feeling, and the truest insight about itself--the feeling that everything made secure crumbles to pieces, that every element of its existence is shattered to atoms, and every bone broken: moreover, it consciously expresses this feeling in words, pronounces judgment and gives luminous utterance concerning all aspects of its condition. Pure insight, therefore, can have here no activity and content of its own, and thus can only take up the formal attitude of truly apprehending this ingenious insight proper to the world and the language it adopts. Since this language is a scattered and broken utterance and the pronouncement a fickle mood of the moment, which is again quickly forgotten, and is only known to be a whole by a third consciousness, this latter can be distinguished as pure insight only if it gathers those several scattered traces into a universal picture, and then makes them the insight of all. * Enlightenment (...