From twod@umich.edu Tue Nov 6 12:20:44 2001
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2001 12:05:05 -0500 (EST)
From: Tom O'Donnell
To: "RC First-Year Seminar, MW 11-12;30
Cc: Tom O'Donnell
Subject: Re: H.F. Hegel

Hi Nicole et al,

This looks like an interesting reference you sent on Hegel (see below). However, let me make a couple points everybody might be interested in:

I see that this info came from the URL at the top of the reference. However, this is not a "citation". You need to have the citation at the bottom of the information, just like you would for anything you quote in a paper. Now sometimes (not all that often, compared to books and journals) you can find adquately formal academic references on line, like those Mr. Gathier put on our class' librarly web site. I believe the information you have here is an online philosophy encyclopedia from Stanford University which I have seen before. There is a page they have at:

http://plato.stanford.edu/cite.html

which is VERY useful to read. They explain how to give a proper and formal citation of something taken from the site.

Everyone should read this page for information on how to cite electronic sources. However, remember, you should probably only use electronic sources for a rather small percentage of your references, and they have to be by some very reputable organization (like Stanford's philosophy department in this case!), etc.

The great majority of the sources should be from journals and library books, encyclopedias, etc. An electronic version of a reputable encyclopedia is fine, but it should be cited in the same format you'd use to cite any other non-electronic source, NOT by just giving its URL. (again, see http://plato.stanford.edu/cite.html)


Cheers
Tom
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Tom O'Donnell, Ph.D. The University of Michigan
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On Sun, 4 Nov 2001 NicoleUMich@aol.com wrote:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/

Life and Work

Born in 1770 in Stuttgart, Hegel spent the years 1788-1793 as a theology student in nearby Tübingen, forming friendships there with fellow students, the future great romatic poet Friedrich Hölderlin and F. D. E. Schelling, who, like Hegel, would become one of the major figures of the German philosophical scene in the first half of the nineteenth century. These friendships clearly had a major influence on Hegelâ^À^Ùs philosophical development, and for a while the intellectual lives of these three were closely intertwined.

Hegelâ^À^Ùs Philosophy

Hegelâ^À^Ùs own pithy account of the nature of philosophy given in the "Preface" to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right captures a characteristic tension in his philosophical approach and, in particular, in his approach to the nature and limits of human cognition. "Philosophy", he says there, "is its own time raised to the level of thought". On the one hand we can clearly see in the phrase "its own time" the suggestion of a historical or cultural conditionedness and variability which applies even to the highest form of human cognition, philosophy itself -- the contents of philosophical knowledge, we might suspect, will come from the historically changing contents of contemporary culture. On the other, there is the hint that with such contents being "raised" to some higher level, presumably higher than the more everyday levels of cognitive functioning -- those based in everyday perceptual experience, for example. This higher level takes the form of "thought" -- a type of cognition commonly taken as capable of having "eternal" contents (think of Plato and Frege, for example). This antithetical combination within human cognition of the temporally-conditioned and the eternal, a combination which reflects a broader conception of the human being as what Hegel describes elsewhere as a "finite-infinite", has led to Hegel being regarded in different ways by different types of philosophical readers. For example, towards the end of our century, an historically-minded " anti-realist" like Richard Rorty, distrustful of all claims or aspirations to the "Godâ^À^Ùs-eye view", could praise Hegel as a philosopher who had introduced this historically reflective dimension into philosophy (and setting it on the characteristically "hermeneutic" path which has predominated in modern continental philosophy) but who had unfortunately still become bogged down in the remnants of the Platonistic idea of the search for ahistorical truths. Those adopting such an approach to Hegel tend to have in mind the (relatively) young author of the Phenomenology of Spirit and have tended to dismiss as "metaphysical" later and more systematic works like the Science of Logic. In contrast, the British Hegelian movement at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, tended to ignore the Phenomenology and the more historicist dimensions of his thought, and found in Hegel a systematic metaphysician whose Logic provided a systematic and definitive philosophical ontology of an idealist type. This latter traditional, "metaphysical" view of Hegel had dominated Hegel reception for most of this century, but has over the last few decades been contested by many Hegel scholars who have offered an alternative, "post-Kantian" view of Hegel.

Bibliography


Beiser, Frederick C., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Harris, H. S., Hegelâ^À^Ùs Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770-1801, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).
Houlgate, Stephen, Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegelâ^À^Ùs Philosophy, (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).
Kojève, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed Allan Bloom, trans. J. H. Nichols, Jr, (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
Pelczynski, Z. A. (ed.), The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegelâ^À^Ùs Political Philosophy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Pinkard, Terry, Hegelâ^À^Ùs Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Pippin, Robert B., Hegelâ^À^Ùs Idealism: the Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Pippin, Robert B. Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations , (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Redding, Paul, Hegelâ^À^Ùs Hermeneutics, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
Taylor, Charles, Hegel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
Williams, Robert R., Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other , (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
Wood, Allen W., Hegelâ^À^Ùs Ethical Thought, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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