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Introduction

Allen Speight
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Summary

Hegel is the first great philosopher to make modernity – in all its historical, cultural and philosophical complexity – his subject. And on whatever lines that modernity is to be explored by our own present generation – as a project that has failed, is discernible only in traces, or that has come to fruition in some ways crucial for our practices and commitments – the Hegelian construal of it remains essential for coming to terms with how we understand ourselves, as agents in and contemplators of a world with a number of characteristics that Hegel was either the first or the most articulate in calling attention to. The sort of characteristics I have in mind are some rather resilient facets of a world that can be said to embrace both Hegel's day and our own, a world where the self and its awareness of its freedom is construed as an achievement, where the modern religious sense of a “death of God” has left a not entirely complete secularism and a seemingly irreducible plurality of religious perspectives in its wake, where the development of ethical and political institutions that “we” can in some sense be aware of “making” are nonetheless also subject to historical shifts and constraints, and where the realm of artistic expression has taken bold and inherently self-referential turns.

The account of modernity that Hegel opens up in these areas is, so I shall make the case, neither a triumphalist recognition and extension of Enlightenment values into the present time nor a philosophical act of mourning for the contradictions of a world that is in decline.

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Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2008

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  • Introduction
  • Allen Speight, Boston University
  • Book: The Philosophy of Hegel
  • Online publication: 05 February 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9781844653805.001
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  • Introduction
  • Allen Speight, Boston University
  • Book: The Philosophy of Hegel
  • Online publication: 05 February 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9781844653805.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Allen Speight, Boston University
  • Book: The Philosophy of Hegel
  • Online publication: 05 February 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9781844653805.001
Available formats
×