| Hegel’s philosophy is almost as difficult as it is ambitious. The language is both familiar and strange, since Hegel wants to assimilate all previous thought in a new synthesis. Though few thinkers today accept such a project, much less Hegel’s execution of it, his strategy continues to fascinate. Maybe this is because he works with the extremes of modern thought, confronting certainty with doubt, subjectivity with active embodiment, the individual with social being, and freedom with its many conditions. In this course we will talk about Hegel’s system and his dialectic, and we will look for ways both have been useful even to some of his severest critics. Our focus will be on epistemological and metaphysical themes and their relation to social and political theory. |