PHL217H1 Lecture : Lecture 5
Document Summary
Walter kaufman (mid 1970"s) or yirmiavi yovel (translation with commentary available online) Preliminaries: the difficulty and significance of hegel"s preface. The text exhibits the tendency in continental philosophy to reflect on itself as a text, and on its manner of writing and exposition. Also perhaps true of kant"s what is enlightenment , i. e. a public text about text being published, but hegel"s reflects on itself to a greater degree. The normal view of cp as having a tendency towards reflecting on its own writing by seeing philosophy itself as a species of literature or poetry is that here, that view itself is rejected. Part of what it"s doing is making a case for itself as scientific writing, far from poetical influences that hegel"s contemporaries exhibits. A good place to start is that hegel spends a good bit of time in the preface explaining why a preface to a philosophical work could not, in fact, be written.
