As a mystery novelist with my first novel in its initial release, I have found that reading a variety of works helps me in my writing. I first came in contact with the works of Hegel as an undergraduate at Claremont McKenna College. Hegel's thoughts have provided foundations for political movements ranging from the far right to the far left, and this work, an excellent translation, provides insight into this thinker's thoughts. Excellent work. A classic in every sense of the word.

This is the work in which Hegel called the absolute that night in which all cows are black. Those people who think that philosophy is impossibly complicated might start by looking at Walter Kaufmann's comments on how bad the other translations and comments on this amazingly swift work by Hegel have been. The other bit of humor here is Hegel attacking philosophy in a way that can only seem to be a personal attack on the views of Schelling, and then Walter Kaufmann thinks Hegel lied when he told Schelling in a letter that he wasn't thinking of him personally when he was writing about how superficial philosophy seems to people who only read the stuff. What is truly astounding is how inspired people feel when they right this kind of stuff. Religion and poetry seem to be competing for inspiration that can claim to be as deep, but religious doctrines and poetic theories get rated along with stale philosophies in this kind of search for an absolute, which really might seem like a night in which all cows are black the first time through this. It helps to have a few other books around to help comprehend this stuff by putting Hegel in a context where this summary of what his first two major works might be about (he wrote his LOGIC later) strives for some importance. This could be as close to official German university philosophy as any student would ever understand, but Hegel might be found complaining here that students don't understand a lot of this any more than other people.

This book is something of a revolution in Hegel studies. It is still hotly debated in the halls of academia. But Cyril O'Regan has broken new ground in his effort to answer the postmodern critics like Derrida who charge that the absolute spirit of Hegel is a new myth tantamount to logomachy.

O'Regan focuses directly on the theology of Hegel as a means to organize all of Hegel's philosophy, and he succeeds admirably because Hegel himself centered his philosophy around his theology. That fact has been obscured for generations who have wondered if Hegel was really a Christian or not. Surely many who used his name in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were atheists, and this has colored our perceptions of Hegel.

O'Regan cuts through all those errors. Perhaps only after the fall of the USSR was it possible for O'Regan's ideas to be heard on their own merits. O'Regan shows us in textual detail how Hegel borrowed freely from the ideas of Meister Eckhardt and Jacob Boehme and other well-known quasi-Gnostic Christian mystics. Hegel's theology of the Trinity, specifically, is an exercise in the triads of his speculative dialectic. His treatment of this speculative thought resembles remarkably the mystic utterances of Eckhardt and Boehme, two writers Hegel liked to quote.

O'Regan is an expert in theology as well as in Hegel's philosophy. He is also an expert in literary criticism and in the postmodern critique in particular. His answer to Derrida is rich in detail and insight. His focus is the crisis in Christianity occassioned by the Enlightenment and its aftermath. Hegel was very much aware of this crisis and he sought to answer it in his unique, dialectical manner.

Postmodern deconstruction challenges the closure of meaning and intelligibility, but postmodernists often exhibit a lack of familiarity with the literature of theology. Some theologians say that a narrative about the self's journey to the Divine is one moment within a narrative about God's historical activities that are themselves moments within a narrative of the movement of the Trinity. This is not usually recognized.

O'Regan smiles at Derrida's charge that Hegel gave in to the seductive powers of truth and meaning because that seduction is nothing but the possibility that truth is possible. For Hegel, Christianity must be revitalized and reformed because it lost its power when it lost its vision of the absolute trinity. Christianity needs a speculative rewriting to prevent its decline into impersonalism. Hegel successfully rejoined Spinoza's logical space to a Christian narrative space with a logic that does not reject narrative but sublates and preserves it.

O'Regan smiles at the postmodern charge that Hegel's dialectical Christianity is mere wish-fulfillment, because the logical space of the concept implies a God, a divine history and a realized apocalypse. Is it wish fulfillment if narrative discourse is consoling? Or is this a question about the ontology of discourse? Hegel did not aim at consolation but at the truth; not a superficial truth, but a scientific truth. If consolation was obtained, perhaps it was incidental to Hegel's project.

Hegel's Christianity is actually different from the one that the skeptics, existentialists and postmodernists have criticized. The postmodernist tends to generalize that Christianity is Logomachy regardless of whether it is a narrative or nonnarrative type, an anthropogenic or theogenic type, a religious or philosophical type, or even a superficial or deep theology. O'Regan returns the charge of dogmatism to the postmoderns. The horror of despair over the death of God may only be balanced by the comedy of the skeptic's self-contradiction.

This is one of the most controversial and scholarly books on Hegel that has ever been written. The debate over this book has only begun, and I invite the interested reader to join the debate early. It's only going to get better.

This dictionary was invaluable while I was translating The Iliad. It is amazingly comprehensive, full of wonderful illustrations that accompany the definitions and includes clear instructions on how to read Homeric verse.

It is hard to describe this book with a few sentences, because it covers a lot of themes: the role of art in Ancient Egypt, the reasons for the special style of representing humans in this old culture, the bodyuse in Egypt's daily life, the religious background of fine art and so forth.
Apparently the author, a longtime practitioner of the Rolfing-method of Structural Integration of the human body, started his research with one discovery and a question emerging out of this discovery. The discovery is: The represented postures of humans in Ancient Egyptian art are in congruence with the vision of structural balance and free movement which Rolfing (and other forms of modern somatic therapy/education) holds. The question is: Did the Egyptians had these values too (4000 years ago!)? The author says "yes" and proves this statement by covering all areas which I mentioned above.
Comparing the art of Ancient Egypt with the art of Ancient Greece (and other cultures) the author makes clear, that the self-understanding of the bodily being is different in different cultures and leads to different ways of representing the human body in fine art.
This book is not only fascinating for people interested in history (of art) or in Ancient Egypt but also for people who see art as one way to understand oneself. Bridging the old days of Egypt with our modern times the author reveals the meaning of a balanced body structure for the human being consisting of body-soul-spirit. From this point of view the reception of Ancient Egyptian art can be a surprisingly modern self-experience if one is able to feel the somatic qualities of the represented people in oneself.
Seldomly enough, authors - being engaged in a specialized field - are able bo connect various aspects of life and science. Hans Georg Brecklinghaus mastered this difficult task in an excellent way.

So many "best of" film books out there simply re-state lists that you have seen a million times. Most of them are American films that tend to be more mainstream as opposed to international and obscure. "Icons of Film: The 20th Century," however, displays about 80 films chronilogically from 1920 to 1999. The films range for the obscure to the better known, low budget to high budget and across all nationalities. The film descriptions also don't simply describe the films, but their importance to film as a whole. A great, stylish guide.

Kahrs deals with some classical Indian theories of meaning focusing on the Kashmir Shaivite use of those theories in the classic commentaries of Sivopadhyaya, Abhinavagupta, and Ksemaraja as they analysis of "Bhavairava." It is an excellent account of how sacred terms carry meaning through semantic contexts.

This is a remarkable piece of philosophical exegesis. In a mere 124 pages, Hartnack explicates the arguments of the Science of Logic. What is particularly interesting is that the Danish author is apparently trained in analytic philosophy, which is notoriously hostile to Hegel and all things Continental. Hartnack makes many references to philosophers such as Strawson, Wittgenstein, Russell, Carnap, and Frege. This is not a mere matter of saying "here's the Analytic Hegel." These references are used conservatively, and only to bring clarity to Hegel's own text. This is not a book that contains the next great "reading" of Hegel a la Kojeve or Hyppolite. But it is perhaps the book that one should seek out if he or she wishes to achieve a nuts and bolts understanding of what is perhaps the most difficult work in the history of philosophy.

This book is unmatched for its wealth of information in a concise format. It is not a "popular" narrative, but a reference work that provides an excellent summary of the best research on the New Testament. It examines each book from the perspectives of content, literary character, theology, date written, and author. Kuemmel (following his predecessors, Feine and Behm) briefly notes the significant conclusions drawn by previous scholars, drawing together a synthesis of their thought (or indicating who has had the better argument when they cannot be reconciled). The briefly stated conclusions are generally clear, and the citations allow the reader to pursue any further research.

This book presents the text with a great introduction and a superb appendix, thus making the book half text and half commentary ... perfect for the student. this text might be a nice way to slide into Hegel. Plus, Penguin Books smell so nice.