Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit' Quotes

“Kantian philosophical caution is thus not actually as cautious as it pretends to be, for it rests on assumptions that it takes for granted.”
― Stephen Houlgate, Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit': A Reader's Guide

“In the Logic, Hegel states that this ‘unity’ of thought and being constitutes the ‘element’ or ‘principle’ of logic.7 Logic thus starts from the idea that being is known by pure thought to be intelligible to pure thought.”
― Stephen Houlgate, Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit': A Reader's Guide

“Hegel was an unsalaried lecturer at the University of Jena, and, as he later told his friend, the philosopher F. W. J. Schelling, he ‘actually completed the final draft in the middle of the night before the Battle of Jena’ (which took place on 14 October 1806 and in which Napoleon’s troops comprehensively defeated the Prussians).1 Furthermore, Hegel had to entrust the last sheets of his manuscript to a courier who rode through French lines to take them to the publisher in Bamberg.”
― Stephen Houlgate, Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit': A Reader's Guide

“Whereas Spinoza begins with contestable definitions of substance, attribute and mode, Hegel begins with the utterly indeterminate thought of pure ‘being’.”
― Stephen Houlgate, Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit': A Reader's Guide

“For Hegel, therefore, all truly critical philosophy in the wake of Kant is governed by the following imperative: all ‘presuppositions or assumptions must equally be given up when we enter into science’. Science – that is to say, philosophy – should thus be ‘preceded by universal doubt, i.e.,”
― Stephen Houlgate, Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit': A Reader's Guide

“In Hegel’s view, an uncritical, or inadequately critical, approach to the categories takes a certain understanding of them on authority – be it the authority of past philosophers, tradition, common sense or formal logic.”
― Stephen Houlgate, Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit': A Reader's Guide

“In Hegel’s view, Kant is the father of the critical era in philosophy to which we all now belong. He contends, however, that Kant himself did not carry out a sufficiently profound critique of the categories. What Kant did, in Hegel’s view, was – mistakenly – restrict their range of validity: he argued that they should be employed to understand only possible objects of experience, but not things ‘in themselves’.”
― Stephen Houlgate, Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit': A Reader's Guide