Philosophy

Abstract

Abstract Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy effectively created the history of philosophy as a discipline, and certainly shaped its course through and beyond the nineteenth century. Moreover, they give extravagant attention to the Greek philosophers, from Thales to Proclus, and figures like Plato and Aristotle are singled out as profound ‘teachers of the human race’. In articulating his novel vision of a thousand years of Greek philosophical history as a single, organic whole, Hegel combined immense erudition and philosophical capability. His overall argument is that every philosophy (Greek and otherwise) has been a form of idealism—a partial anticipation of Hegel’s own Absolute Idealism. This surprising claim may not be fully vindicated in the case of each single philosopher, but his readings are always informed and stimulating—and worth some attention. This chapter summarizes how Hegel interprets each ancient thinker and/or school with an eye to the sources that he was reading, to his omissions, as well as to some of the insights that earned praise from later specialists and commentators. Throughout, the chapter uncovers Hegel’s ontological logic at work both in miniature (e.g. Plato’s Philebus) and on the largest scale, as it envisions Greek philosophy moving from the articulation of the ‘universal’ notion of the (Aristotelian) divine Thought through its ‘particular’ Hellenistic refractions and on to its more ‘concrete’ development among the Neoplatonists in late Roman Alexandria.