Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness

This is the most important book on Hegel to have appeared in the past ten years. Robert Pippin offers a completely new interpretation of Hegel’s idealism, which focuses on Hegel’s appropriation and development of kant’s theoretical project. Hegel is presented neither as a precritical metaphysician nor as a social theorist, but as a critical philosopher whose disagreements with Kant, especially on the issue of intuitions, enrich the idealist arguments against empiricism, realism and naturalism. In the face of the dismissal of absolute idealism as either unintelligible or implausible, Pippin explains and defends an original account of the philosophical basis for Hegel’s claims about the historical and social nature of selfconsciousness, and so of knowledge itself.

Acknowledgments; Primary texts abbreviations; Part I. The Idealist Background: 1. Introduction; 2. Kantian and Hegelian idealism; 3. Fichte’s contribution; 4. The Jena formulations; Part II. The Phenomenology of Idealism: 5. Skepticism, knowledge, and thruth in the Jena phenomenology; 6. Overcoming consciousness; 7. satisfying self-consciousness; Part III. Idealist Logic: 8. Objective logic; 9. Reflected being; 10. Hegel’s idea; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

‘ … the scholarship on which the book is based is first-rate and the presentation is genuinely philosophical … the book is an important one, and one any serious advanced student of German Idealism will have to read.’

– Professor Raymond Geuss, Columbia University

‘In the history of Hegel interpretation this will (I hope) prove to be a very influential book. it should forever put paid to the myth of Hegel’s speculative philosophy as a direct return to the high rationalist tradition which Kant condemned as ‘dogmatic’ … This achievement makes Pippin’s book a major event in the story of our effort to understand Hegel.’

– Professor H. S. Harris, York University, Toronto