Hegel, the philosopher most responsible for linking philosophy to history, appropriately argued that in his own day there simply could not be Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, or Epicureans, that one could not bring back an earlier stage of thought. In this massive two volume study Vittorio Hösle argues that, in the spirit of Hegel himself, there also cannot be contemporary Hegelians. But there can be “philosophers who attempt to mediate the tradition of objective idealism from Plato to Hegel with post-Hegelian philosophy and with contemporary science”, (p 57n) In the past many of the philosophers who have attempted such a “mediation” have concentrated on one or another aspect of Hegel's project, usually his philosophical anthropology, his social theory or political theory, his critique of modernity, theory of alienation, etc. Hösle ambitiously takes up what looks to be the most unlikely candidate for any “contemporary mediation,” Hegel's entire systematic attempt to link together “Logic”, “Philosophy of Nature” and “Philosophy of Spirit”.

Often Hösle's study is simply a survey of Hegel's systematic enterprise, providing paraphrase and plausibility where possible, summarising claims, excusing or pointing out excesses, pausing to debate other commentators, or complain about prominent mis-readings. He introduces his account with a long historical and theoretical discussion of Hegel's Encyclopedia system, and then offers a running commentary on its three major parts, devoting the largest blocks of attention to the Logic and the philosophy of objective spirit in the Rechtsphilosophie. But there is throughout one great thematic problem at issue that sets the tone of the book at the beginning and is returned to again and again.

What is remarkable about Hegel's creative activity (in the period 1808-12) is the diversity of its contrasts: his thinking and writing of The Science of Logic was going on while he was caught up in the daily tasks of newspaper editorship and then of school-teaching and administration. The contrast is enhanced if we include his Philosophical Propaedeutic here, and place it against The Science of Logic. (We can regard them as having been written almost simultaneously.) The latter book is intended for the learned specialist, and is concerned with elucidating the ultimate structure of reality in the most abstract terms. As a work of philosophy it is technical to an extreme; it is his most recondite work, making no concessions to the difficulties a reader might encounter. The Philosophical Propaedeutic, on the other hand, is intended for the student at secondary school and junior college, and is concerned in part with the concrete social values embedded in social morality and religion. As a work, it is entirely accessible and “open”, and it represents Hegel's attempt to lead his students from their view of the immediate social reality up to an all-encompassing world-vision. (There is a further contrast in the fact that it was not written as a book at all, but as a series of lecture-notes, and was put together as a book by Karl Rosenkranz, nine years after Hegel's death.)

Obviously it was because there was no university post for him that he accepted the position of Rector and Professor of Philosophy at the Aegidien Gymnasium in Nuremberg, in 1808. Yet his acceptance was not accompanied by the attitude of faute de mieux -- as though “the speculative Pegasus were being harnessed to the wagon of schoolwork.”