27 February 2017

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

This will be a team-taught, intensive course, in which we will study Hegel’s distinctive, phenomenological project through three works.  We will begin with the Phenomenology of Spirit itself, a rich and colourful book that studies the ways in which experience is meaningful at every level from immediate, sensory awareness, through interpersonal relationships, to political and religious life.  From this book, we will focus first on the studies of cognition and self-knowledge, in which Hegel studies the basic, dynamic parameters of our experiential life.  We will use this as a foundation to study two other works by Hegel that fill out more fully some of the ideas introduced in the later sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit.  We will study the section on “Objective Spirit” in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences to investigate the nature and forms of political life, and we will study his Aesthetics to investigate the nature of art and its role in human life.  These latter studies will be supplemented with readings from the Phenomenology of Spirit on politics and religion.


The course meets Mondays from 10:00-3:00 and Tuesdays from 4:00–9:00 for 4 weeks.

ICS 220603 W17
Drs. Shannon Hoff and John Russon 
Mon/Tue: 10:00-15:00; 16:00-21:00 (Feb 27 - Mar 21)
(MA, PhD)