Interpreting Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: Expositions and Critique of Contemporary Readings

This book focuses on the interpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that have proved influential over the past decades. Current readers of Hegel’s Phenomenology face an abundance of interpretive literature devoted to this difficult text and confront a plethora of different philosophical presuppositions, research strategies and hermeneutic efforts.To enable a better orientation within the interpretative landscape, the essays in this volume summarize, contextualize and critically comment on the issues and currents in contemporary Phenomenology scholarship. There is a common set of three questions that each of the contributions seeks to answer: (1) What kind of text is The Phenomenology of Spirit? (2) What do the different strategies of interpretation conceptually bring to the text? (3) How do different interpreters justify their verdict on whether the Phenomenology is still a viable project?

Ivan Boldyrev is Assistant Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is the author of Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries (2014); Hegel, Institutions and Economics (with Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, 2014); and Die Ohnmacht des Spekulativen: Elemente einer Poetik von Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes (2021). Apart from German Idealism and critical theory, he also works on the history and philosophy of economics.

Sebastian Stein is a Lecturer and a DFG Research Associate at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. He is co-editor of Hegel’s Political Philosophy (with Thom Brooks, 2017), Hegel and Contemporary Practical Philosophy (with James Gledhill, 2019) and Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences: A Critical Guide (with Joshua Wretzel, 2021). He has authored several journal articles and book chapters on Aristotle, Kant and post-Kantian idealism.