The Problem of Nature in Hegel's Final System constitutes a sustained attempt to critically reconstruct, rethink, and (re-)evaluate key developments within Hegel's philosophy of human freedom in terms of his often disregarded conception of nature. Against established readings of Hegel's final encyclopaedic system, it attempts a disorienting inversion of emphasis by taking seriously his often maligned writings on nature: it carefully reconstructs the core features of his philosophy of nature before critically examining what they must mean for his more recognised concern for the historical unfolding of human freedom. This inversion allows us to develop a distinct sense of the fundamental materialism permeating Hegel's concept of freedom, how the former serves as the inescapable anteriority and precondition of subjectivity and the sophisticated account of sociopolitical history in which it is embedded. Simultaneously, it shows us the myriad of ways in which material nature and culture's reactions to it problematise human freedom – even outline the possibility of its own annihilation. By unlocking this opaque undercurrent of the final system by way of a sort of genealogical excavation, we are given an entirely distinct portrait of Hegel's thought. Facile proclamations of the ensured ‘triumph of spirit’ become problematic, if not untenable. It forces us to reconsider what Hegel's thought might offer our living philosophical present, especially when the former is considered in terms of the volatile, dynamic, and problematic nature–culture relationship it establishes – the complex terrain explored conceptually in his ‘philosophy of the real’ [Realphilosophie]. Hegel, therefore, presents our contemporary world with a strikingly relevant position, one that forces us to rethink not only our received understanding of his philosophy, but our situation within the world.