Hegel's Sole Idea - by Mark Alznauer (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An accessible reconstruction of Hegel's attempt to derive all reality from a single concept.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, G. W. F. Hegel came to believe that philosophy was finally in a position to achieve something it had striven for since ancient Greece: becoming an objective, demonstrative science. But to achieve this aim, he thought philosophical knowledge needed to be reconceived in a radically new way--as content contained in a single concept just as the oak tree is hidden in the acorn. In Hegel's Sole Idea, Mark Alznauer reads Hegel's mature philosophical system as the unprecedented attempt to comprehend the entire world as the full unfolding of that single concept, which he mysteriously calls "the absolute idea."

Ever since Hegel set out this program in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, Hegel's system has been regarded as the last best hope of philosophy as an autonomous, fully rational science. But while Hegel's followers regarded the Encyclopedia as the successful realization of the traditional aims of philosophy, his most influential successors thought it instead showed the exhaustion and collapse of that project. Hegel's Sole Idea offers a comprehensive interpretation of Hegelian philosophy that allows a fair confrontation with its most provocative and ambitious claims.

Review Quotes

"Alznauer's Hegel is a son of Plato in that he understands philosophy's aim to be that of arriving at the complete nonempirical knowledge of essences. I'm aware of few works on Hegel's logic that achieve this degree of cogency and clarity. The book is a tour de force, likely to be appreciated as such even by those not fully persuaded by Alznauer's interpretation."

"An impressive achievement. This book delivers the most sophisticated articulation and defense we have yet received of Hegel's ambitious, inspiring concept of the absolute idea as both radically presuppositionless and yet rich and concrete enough to support the elaboration of full-blown philosophies of nature and spirit."

About the Author

Mark Alznauer is associate professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the author of Hegel's Theory of Responsibility.