Philosophy

In 1801, a twenty-nine-year-old Hegel published his first independent philosophical work, a dense critical essay comparing the systems of his two great contemporaries, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. The essay, known in English as “On the Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy” and usually called simply the Differenzschrift, announced the…

Hegel wrote “The German Constitution” between 1799 and 1802, in the shadow of Napoleon’s armies reorganizing the map of Europe, and he never published it during his lifetime. The manuscript sat unfinished and unpublished until after his death, when it emerged as evidence of a political mind working through questions that would eventually produce the…

Hegel published the “Philosophy of Right” in 1821, at the height of his powers and at the center of German intellectual life as Professor of Philosophy in Berlin. It is his most sustained and systematic treatment of law, morality, society, and the state, and it remains one of the foundational texts of political philosophy. The…

Hegel delivered his lectures on aesthetics at the University of Berlin four times between 1820 and 1829, and he never published them as a book. What we have as “Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art” is a posthumous compilation assembled by his student Heinrich Gustav Hotho from lecture notes and student transcripts, first published in 1835,…

In 2015, Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician at a Flint, Michigan hospital, noticed something troubling in her data: blood lead levels in children under five had nearly doubled since the city switched its water supply to the Flint River in 2014. When she published her findings, state officials attacked her methodology, accused her of causing panic,…

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote “Twilight of the Idols” in the summer of 1888, completing it in about two weeks. He was forty-four years old and had roughly six months of productive intellectual life left before his mental collapse in January 1889. The book he produced in that extraordinary burst of late work is compact, ferocious, and…

John Stuart Mill published “Utilitarianism” in 1863, originally as a series of three articles in Fraser’s Magazine, and the short book that resulted has been required reading in moral philosophy ever since. At roughly sixty pages of main text, it is one of the most efficient introductions to a major ethical theory in the philosophical…

Friedrich Nietzsche published “Beyond Good and Evil” in 1886, the same year he completed the final revision of “The Birth of Tragedy” and wrote new prefaces to several of his earlier works. He was forty-two and had fewer than three productive years of writing left. The book he produced that year is his most systematic…

Hegel’s “Lectures on Fine Art,” known in German as the “Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik,” represent the most ambitious attempt in the history of philosophy to think systematically about every major art form: their origins, their internal logic, their historical development, and their relationship to the deepest questions about truth, freedom, and human self-understanding. Compiled posthumously…