INTRODUCTION

More than thirty years ago Dieter Henrich expressed the view that Hegel's philosophical intentions are still more or less obscure. This view has been very influential. Were it still true, then Robert Brandom's observation with regard to Hegel would be false, namely that “[t]raditions are lived forward but understood backward.” For in order to live or better to think the Hegelian tradition forward and to understand Hegel backward, it is necessary to make sense of his philosophical intentions. Fortunately, research has contributed a good deal of clarification to the situation so that now-adays Hegel is acknowledged as a contemporary interlocutor. The current appreciation of Hegel's thought goes especially for the Phenomenology of Spirit. The “forward – backward” view might be regarded as the reason why discussion of the Phenomenology during past decades basically followed three lines of thought – a metaphysical, a transcendental, and a social one. Those following the metaphysical line mainly concentrated on the metaphysical conception of the Phenomenology as a systematic introduction to absolute idealism. Accordingly the work is seen as offering a new way of providing the possibility of metaphysics, which Hegel then develops in detail in the Science of Logic. On the other side, those who advocated the transcendental line argued that Hegel's philosophical intentions in the Phenomenology should be understood from a broadly Kantian perspective, since the work furthers the Kantian program of criticizing human knowledge by going beyond the original Kantian scope.