Hegel came to maturity as a philosopher during the first years of the nineteenth century, developing through prodigious intellectual struggles a highly original conception of dialectic as a method for rationally comprehending traumatic historical change. At the same time, he continued a process begun earlier, of critical engagement with the Christian gospel and its historical ethos. Hegel spent much of his youth reacting against this drama and its cultural expression. By the time he published his early masterpiece, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), he had found an ingenious way...
Hegel came to maturity as a philosopher during the first years of the nineteenth century, developing through prodigious intellectual struggles a hi...