Although Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy was teaching material intended for students and published posthumously, it would be wrong to regard this work as irrelevant to his philosophical project. In his introduction to the Lectures, Hegel emphasised that the history of philosophy should not be treated as a mere accumulation of opinions, or as a random collection of correct and incorrect views according to some later standards. The history of philosophy, just like art, religion and Recht, reflects the necessary logical determinations of the Idea, and in this sense it should be studied with the intent of revealing those determinations. Hegel, of course, intended his project to be sufficiently established through the Phenomenology and the Logic without the need to resort to any historical manifestations of culture. However, his interpretation of the history of philosophy does reveal his own philosophical agenda more straightforwardly than the ahistorical complex accounts of his other major works.

Hegel's intention was to present the development of the history of philosophy as a reflection of the development of the Idea. Therefore, one would assume that the further we go back in time, we would find philosophers whose doctrines were less mature and more distant from Hegel's own conception of philosophy. However, Hegel seems to have singled out a few favourite philosophers, to whom he did not hesitate to attribute insights that could not possibly have been developed at the time, according to his pre-conceived pattern of development. One famous example was Aristotle, whom he credited with the conception of a Reason that becomes its own object, i.e., Reason which is ‘in and for-itself.’ A philosopher belonging to the ‘objective’ stage of the spirit could not normally have achieved such a conception.