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by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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In: History - Other·Philosophy & Ethics
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #51635.
This work is the first volume of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s three‑part “History of Philosophy,” drawn from the lecture series he gave in Jena, Heidelberg and Berlin between 1805 and 1830. The opening pages explain that the text is a composite of carefully edited notes, student transcripts and Hegel’s own written outlines, all assembled by his pupil Michelet for the 1840 second edition. The translator notes the difficulty of rendering Hegel’s technical terms, “Notion,” “Idea,” “popular conception”, and strives for literal fidelity while keeping the prose intelligible. The volume begins with a systematic introduction to the notion of philosophical history, followed by a detailed table of contents that maps the treatment of Oriental thought, Greek sages, and the early schools, setting the stage for a thorough, source‑based survey of philosophical development.
The style is that of early‑19th‑century German academic lecturing, dense with systematic definitions and a reflective, sometimes rhetorical tone. Hegel’s own voice, filtered through the translator’s footnotes, retains the grand, almost prophetic enthusiasm of his inaugural Heidelberg address, where he urges a revival of “the higher sciences.” Readers who relish rigorous historical analysis, are comfortable with philosophical jargon, and appreciate the intellectual atmosphere of German idealism will find this volume rewarding. It is especially suited to scholars of philosophy, historians of ideas, and anyone interested in the foundations of the Western philosophical canon.
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IT is perhaps unnecessary to say anything respecting the difficulty of making any adequate translation of Hegel’s writings. In the case of the History of Philosophy, that difficulty is possibly enhanced by the fact that the greater part of the book is put together from the notes of different courses of lectures delivered on the subject at various times. Hegel, as we learn from Michelet, in his preface to the first edition of this work, lectured in all nine times on the History of Philosophy: first in Jena in 1805-1806, then in Heidelberg in 1816-1817 and 1817-1818, and the other six times in Berlin between the years 1819 and 1830. He had begun the tenth course on the subject in 1831 when death cut his labours short. It was only for the first course of lectures—that delivered in Jena—that Hegel fully wrote out his lectures; this was evidently done with the intention of future publication in book form. At Heidelberg he composed a short abstract of his subject, giving in a few terse words the main points dealt with in each system of Philosophy. In the later courses of lectures Hegel trusted to extempore speaking, but at the same time made considerable use of the above writings, the margins of which he annotated with subsequent additions. Besides these annotations he left behind him a large number of miscellaneous notes, which have proved of the greatest value. The present translation is taken from the second and amended edition of the “Geschichte der Philosophie,” published in 1840. This edition is derived from no one set of lectures in particular, but carefully prepared by Michelet—himself one of Hegel’s pupils—from all available sources, including the notes of students. The Jena volume is, however, made the basis, as representing the main elements of the subject afterwards to be more fully amplified; or, in Michelet’s words, as the skeleton which was afterwards to be clothed with flesh.
I have endeavoured to make this translation as literal as possible consistently with intelligibility, and have attempted, so far as might be, to give the recognized symbols for the words for which we have in English no satisfactory equivalents. “Begriff,” when used in its technical sense, is translated by “Notion,” “Idee” by “Idea,” as distinguished from the colloquial “idea”; “Vorstellung” is usually rendered by “popular” or “ordinary conception.”
Miss Frances H. Simson has rendered very valuable assistance in going carefully over most of the proofs of the first volume, and she is now engaged with me in the translation of the volumes following.
E. S. H.
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