Lectures on the History of Philosophy

Not to be confused with Lectures on the Philosophy of History.

The Lectures on the History of Philosophy (German: Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie) were delivered by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in 1805-6, 1816-1818, 1819, 1820, 1825–26, 1827–28, 1829–30, and 1831, just before he died in November of that year.^[1][2]

Overview

Hegel's lecture notes were edited by his student, Karl Ludwig Michelet in 1833, and revised in 1840-1842. An English translation was provided by Elizabeth Haldane in 1892.^[1][3]

In it, he outlined his ideas on the major philosophers. He saw consciousness as progressing from an undifferentiated pantheism of the East to a more individualistic understanding culminating in the freedom of the Germanic era.

In his lectures Hegel cites extensively the voluminous histories of philosophy written in Germany after 1740; among them: Johann Jakob Brucker's Historia critica philosophiae, 6 vols. (1742–1767; "Critical History of Philosophy"); Johann Buhle's Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, 8 vols. (1796–1804; "Textbook on the History of Philosophy"); Dietrich Tiedemann's Geist der spekulativen Philosophie von Thales bis Berkeley, 6 vols. (1791–1797; "The Spirit of Speculative Philosophy from Thales to Berkeley"); and Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann's Geschichte der Philosophie, 11 vols. (1789–1819; "History of Philosophy").