01 December 2008

Appreciating the Little Things

The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy has footnotes, rather than endnotes. This is the first Cambridge Companion I've noticed this for.

They really do make the book a lot easier to read. Death to endnotes!

(The Cambridge Companions even had endnotes after every essay rather than all at the back of the book, so you couldn't even just stick a bookmark in the back and use that for all of the footnotes in the book.... Just terrible.)

So far, I've read the first two essays, and both are good. I need to read Pinkard's full biography at some point. The distilled version here was a fun read. Much better than Horst Althaus's biography, which is the only full Hegel biography I've read.

Also: I am amused at the title of this volume. None of the essays is about Hegel's relationship to the rest of "nineteenth-century philosophy"; every essay has Hegel alone as its theme. Nothing about Hegel & Marx, or Hegel & Kierkegaard, or even Hegel & Schelling. Every article focuses on a period of Hegel's life or a segment of his work, except for the introduction and Pinkard's biographical chapter. Where Hegel is related to other philosophers, Kant looks to be the main interlocutor. The title of the book just doesn't make any sense. Guessing it was decided as a formality; it has the same format as "Kant and Modern Philosophy", which did have a few pieces about how Kant fit in among his predecessors.

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