"Lectures on the History of Philosophy" is one of the masterpieces of Hegel, the master of classical German philosophy. It is the pioneer work of "History of Philosophy" and a must-read book for philosophers. On the one hand, Hegel incorporated the history of philosophy into the framework of his objective idealism system and attributed the history of philosophy to the absolute spiritual stage in which ideas return to themselves; on the other hand, Hegel implemented dialectics in the study of the history of philosophy, profoundly revealing the development laws of the history of philosophy. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. He Lin, Wang Taiqing and others translated it into Chinese and published it, which was an important achievement of Mr. He Lin's translation of Hegel. This publication in the "Complete Works of He Lin" solves the problems of inconsistent styles in previous versions due to the long publication time, and is more in line with current reading habits.
The four volumes of "Lectures on the History of Philosophy" cover Hegel's evaluation of philosophy in all ages from Thales in ancient Greece to Schelling in modern Germany. It is mainly divided into three parts: Greek philosophy, medieval philosophy, and modern philosophy.
The first volume includes an introduction, Eastern philosophy, and Greek philosophy from Thales to Anaxagoras. Among them, in the introductory part, Hegel made a concentrated discussion on the concept of the history of philosophy, the relationship between philosophy and other knowledge departments, as well as the periodization, sources of historical materials and exposition methods of the history of philosophy, and briefly discussed Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy.
The second volume contains the second and third stages of the first issue of Greek philosophy, discussing the philosophy from the Sophists, Socrates, Plato to Aristotle.
The third volume discusses the second and third periods of Greek philosophy, as well as "Medieval Philosophy", including Arabic philosophy, scholasticism and Renaissance.
The fourth volume discusses the "modern philosophy" part from Bacon and Boehmer to Fichte and Schelling, and includes "Sixteen Letters of Hegel on the History of Philosophy" as an appendix (translated by Miao Litian), as well as an index of terms and names of the four volumes of the book.
