A monumental new biography of a pivotal yet poorly understood pioneer in modern philosophy. When a painter once told Goethe that he wanted to paint the most celebrated man of the age, Goethe directed him to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel worked from the credo: To philosophize is to learn to live freely. While he was slow and cautious in the development of his philosophy, his intellectual growth was like an odyssey of the mind, and, contrary to popular belief, his life was full of twists and turns, suspense and even danger. In this landmark biography, the philosopher Klaus Vieweg paints a new picture of the life and work of the most important representative of German idealism. His vivid portrait provides readers an intimate account of Hegel's times and the milieu in which he developed his thought, along with detailed, clear-sighted analyses of Hegel's four major works. What results is a new interpretation of Hegel through the lens of reason and freedom. Vieweg draws on extensive archival research that has brought to light a wealth of hitherto undiscovered documents and handwritten notes relating to Hegel's work, touching on Hegel's engagement with the leading thinkers and writers of his age: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hölderlin, and others. Combatting clichés and misunderstandings about Hegel, Vieweg also offers a sustained defense of the philosopher's more progressive impulses. Highly praised upon its release in Germany as having set the new biographical standard, this monumental work emphasizes Hegel's relevance for today, depicting him as a vital figure in the history of philosophy.

"Hegel and scepticism" remains an intriguing topic directly concerning the logical and methodological core of Hegel's system. A series of contributions is unfolding around a keynote paper by Klaus Vieweg, which tries to understand and restate the limits and the content of the relationship between Hegels philosophy and scepticism. Various Hegel readers with different concerns are dealing with Hegel's strategy in a large range of theoretical areas.

Im Zentrum dieses Bandes steht die Frage, wie unter Zugrundelegung der Evolutionstheorie Natur und Geist in ihrem Verhaltnis zueinander und in ihren verschiedenen Ausgestaltungen bestimmt werden konnen. Was leistet die evolutionare Forschungsperspektive beispielsweise zur Aufklarung humanspezifischer Charakteristika oder auch zur Entstehung und Bewertung von asthetischer Erfahrung und Vernunft? Einerseits treten vielfaltige geistig-kognitiven Fahigkeiten des Menschen schon im Tierreich in verschiedenen Vorformen und Variationen auf, so dass eine evolutionare Kontinuitat aufgrund so unterschiedlicher Disziplinen wie der Palaontologie, Molekulargenetik, den Neurowissenschaften oder der vergleichenden Primatenforschung immer besser belegt werden kann. Andererseits zeichnet sich bereits die naturliche Evolution durch die Hervorbringung vielfaltiger emergenter Entitaten und Eigenschaften aus, wie beispielsweise von Organismen und deren struktureller Kopplung mit der Umwelt, was bedeutet, dass sowohl ihre durch Selbst- und Fremdbezuglichkeit charakterisierten Strukturen als auch ihr Verhalten durch eine spezifische Form von qualitative Neuheit gepragt sind. Mit Beitragen von: Arnold Berleant, Ralf Beuthan, Eckart Forster, Yvonne Forster, Michael Forster, Christian Illies, Ryosuke Ohashi, Joelle Proust, Isidoro Reguera, Christian Spahn, Christian Tewes, Evan Thompson, Dieter Wandschneider, Klaus Vieweg und Annett Wienmeister"

The dialectic between reason and imagination forms a key element in Romantic and post-Romantic philosophy, science, literature, and art. "Inventions of the Imagination, Romanticism and Beyond" explores the diverse theories and assessments of this dialectic in a collection of essays by philosophers and literary and cultural critics.

By the end of the eighteenth century, an insistence on reason as the predominant human faculty had run its course, and the imagination began to emerge as another force whose contributions to human intellectual existence and productivity had to be newly calculated and constantly recalibrated. The attempt to establish a universal form of reason alongside a plurality of imaginative capacities describes the ideological program of modernism from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day. Are these two drives actually compatible with one another? Can a universal and monolithic form of reason tolerate the play, flexibility, and unpredictability of imaginative creativity? This collection chronicles some of the vicissitudes in the conceptualization and evaluation of the imagination across time and in a variety of intellectual disciplines, including philosophy, aesthetic theory, and literary studies.

These essays analyze the work of a range of predominately German and British philosophers and poets, including Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Blake, Keats, and Goethe. Together they create a rich and nuanced dialogue on the roles literature, fictions, and works of art in general-understood as products of the imagination-play for and in philosophical systems.

Richard T. Gray is the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood professor of Germanics at the University of Washington. Nicholas Halmi is University Lecturer in English Literature of the Romantic Period at the University College, Oxford. Gary J. Handwerk is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Washington. Michael A. Rosenthal is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Washington. Klaus Vieweg is professor of philosophy at Friedrich Shiller University.