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Robert F. Brown, editor and translator. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1825-26. Volume II: Greek Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Pp. xiv + 375. Cloth, $160.00.
Hegel delivered his lectures on the history of philosophy nine times during his career, giving them for the first time in Winter 1805-06 in Jena prior to his publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807. He began to give them for a tenth time before his death in Berlin in 1831. Hegel understood the history of philosophy as philosophy, as showing how reason or spirit in the form of philosophy develops through successive stages to the point that philosophical thinking attains its own self-conscious and self-determinate mode of existence. For Hegel, in the study of its history, philosophy comprehends itself as a systematic development through time.
Hegel regarded philosophy as a unique product of Greek culture, arising directly from the Greek spirit of being at home with itself (Heimatlichkeit) without any proper precedents in near Eastern mythologies or in Chinese and Indian philosophies. Although Hegel briefly discusses Oriental philosophy in the first volume of his lectures, he does not regard such philosophy as belonging to the history of philosophy in...