Church, Jeffrey. "Review of Dean Moyar, et al. ,eds. HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT." NDPR (November 2008).

Moyar, Dean, and Michael Quante, eds. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: a Critical Guide. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. Few texts in the history of thought are as difficult and yet as exciting as Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. In the 201 years since its publication, the Phenomenology has had a broad influence on diverse fields of thought, including philosophy, sociology, theology, political science, and literary theory. It has been a source of philosophical inspiration for some and the frustratingly wrong-headed celebration of everything disastrous in modern thought for others. Yet what remains constant is that the Phenomenology demands and indeed has elicited thoughtful interlocutors who must combine Hegel's own qualities -- at once philosophically rigorous and focused, and also imaginative and comprehensive. The twelve contributors to Moyar and Quante's excellent volume are readers of just this variety. They wrestle with small portions of Hegel's challenging text and show how Hegel's insights can help advance and even transform our thinking about traditional philosophical problems. This makes the Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide a belated but fitting bicentennial birthday present. This volume is the first to appear in Cambridge's "Critical Guide" series, which is devoted to examining the great works of philosophy, one work at a time (future installments will include Mill's On Liberty (December 2008) and Kant's "Idea for a Universal History" (May 2009)). One outstanding feature of this series is that it collects an "international team of contributors," and Moyar and Quante's volume is certainly no exception. German scholars like Fulda, Horstmann, and Siep have been producing excellent work on Hegel for more than a generation, but have not enjoyed a wide English-language readership. In the past ten years, however, more and more translations of German scholarly works on Hegel have appeared (see, for instance, Quante's Hegel's Concept of Action (2004) and Pippin and Höffe (eds.), Hegel on Ethics and Politics (2004)). This volume continues this salutary trend by including essays by six leading German philosophers. The aim of the volume is twofold: first, the essays try to clarify Hegel's arguments and purposes in some of the central or especially difficult passages of the Phenomenology. The volume is organized in accordance with Hegel's own text, though some portions of the Phenomenology are given much more attention than others: four essays are devoted to the chapter on Spirit, for instance, whereas only one examines the chapter on Reason. The second aim of the volume explains in part this disproportional treatment. Each essay elicits those arguments in Hegel, which, when suitably clarified, can be brought to bear on contemporary philosophical problems. As Moyar and Quante argue in the Preface, these claims include Hegel's epistemological "holism", his account of the relationship between the "natural and the normative," and his view of the relationship between theory and practice (xiii-xiv). These different claims are rooted in Hegel's difficult concept of "Spirit," which commentators have increasingly come to understand in a non-metaphysical sense. That is, commentators, and especially those in this volume (with Horstmann an important exception), have come to explain this concept in terms of something like Sellars' "space of reasons," or of what Pinkard calls in his recent book on the Phenomenology "social space," that is, as a self-developing system of norms embedded in concrete social and political institutions from which individuals derive their self-understanding. In recent years, this concept of Spirit has gained some traction in Anglo-American analytic philosophy in the work of Robert Brandom and John McDowell. Most of the contributors in this volume recognize Brandom's inferentialism in one way or another as a promising programmatic statement of some central Hegelian claims (see Heidemann, Moyar, and Pippin), yet see greater possibilities in Hegel's concept of Spirit than Brandom's pragmatism admits. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14525.