Hegel Texts And Commentary: Theology [Paperback]

Walter Kaufmann (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press; 1 edition (June 30, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0268010692
• ISBN-13: 978-0268010690
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #592,149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Helpful text, but not perfect., September 12, 2003

By 

Nicq MacDonald (Sioux Falls, SD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hegel Texts And Commentary: Theology (Paperback)

Hegel has long been known as being an incomprehensible German philosopher, much like his predecessor Kant, and many others who followed, such as Heidegger and Husserl- sure to confound the casual reader and give even dedicated students headaches. In Hegel: Text and Commentary, famed translator and philosopher Walter Kaufmann, who so skillfully cleansed Nietzsche's bad name after the fallout of WW II, attempts to provide running commentary on Hegel's Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, which attempts to introduce Hegel's philosophy in a readable manner.

Kaufmann's notes are helpful in deciphering Hegel's work, but they still fall a bit short, at least for the casual reader. Unlike the eminently readable Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard, Hegel, even with a good translator and guide, is still very difficult material. I'd recommend that anyone studying Hegel's philosophy without prior knowledge of his system also pick up a copy of Fichte's "Vocation of Man", the direct predecessor to Hegel's work. Fichte's philosophy provides the foundation for understanding Hegel's, and makes deciphering his dense prose decidedly easier.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars absolutely horrible, April 10, 2010

By 

Daniel A. "Mesmer7" (Sterling Hts., MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hegel Texts And Commentary: Theology (Paperback)

Bad typography and bad layout make this book nearly impossible to read. I've read about a dozen introductions to various philosophers, and this was absolutely the worst one. The book is so poorly laid out, that you can't even tell where some paragraphs begin and end. The translation is on the left pages, the commentary on the right pages. But there's no change in typography between the pages, so the section headings and text seem to jump incoherently.

If you want to learn about Hegel philosophy, I suggest finding another source.

5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hegelian cows here at home., June 23, 2001

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hegel Texts And Commentary: Theology (Paperback)

This is the work in which Hegel called the absolute that night in which all cows are black. Those people who think that philosophy is impossibly complicated might start by looking at Walter Kaufmann's comments on how bad the other translations and comments on this amazingly swift work by Hegel have been. The other bit of humor here is Hegel attacking philosophy in a way that can only seem to be a personal attack on the views of Schelling, and then Walter Kaufmann thinks Hegel lied when he told Schelling in a letter that he wasn't thinking of him personally when he was writing about how superficial philosophy seems to people who only read the stuff. What is truly astounding is how inspired people feel when they right this kind of stuff. Religion and poetry seem to be competing for inspiration that can claim to be as deep, but religious doctrines and poetic theories get rated along with stale philosophies in this kind of search for an absolute, which really might seem like a night in which all cows are black the first time through this. It helps to have a few other books around to help comprehend this stuff by putting Hegel in a context where this summary of what his first two major works might be about (he wrote his LOGIC later) strives for some importance. This could be as close to official German university philosophy as any student would ever understand, but Hegel might be found complaining here that students don't understand a lot of this any more than other people.