Welcome to this special site celebrating Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s 250th birthday on 27 August 2020. To mark the occasion, we have collated a wide range of Cambridge content from across books and journals, along with brand new podcasts and blogs featuring some of today’s leading Hegel scholars, as well as an interview with Terry Pinkard where he discusses Hegel's impact today, his distinctive readings of Hegel and also Hegel's life in a historical context. 

It is significant that, like Beethoven, Hölderlin and Wordsworth, Hegel was born in 1770. These figures all experienced the seismic event of the French Revolution while on the brink of adulthood. Hegel’s extraordinarily ambitious early work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, is still marked by this, with its images of bursting forth into a new era.

As Hegel refined the philosophical project that the Phenomenology both introduced and, in the end, found it needed to try and encompass within itself, he rose to become one of the most influential intellectuals in Europe. He was at the height of his powers as a professor at the University of Berlin, where he expounded his philosophical system to large audiences, when his life was suddenly cut short during the cholera pandemic that hit the city in 1831.

A systematic thinker par excellence, Hegel contributed to a wide array of interconnected areas (as the material made available here reveals). There have been many waves of Hegel interpretation and reinterpretation, in more recent years among both ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophers. Scholars are also increasingly grappling with Hegel’s involvement in European racism, while at the same time the politically emancipatory power of his thought continues to be explored. In many senses, Hegel remains, 250 years on, a living and challenging thinker.

Written by Christoph Schuringa, editor of Hegel Bulletin

Listen

Hear from leading Hegel scholars as they discuss Hegel.

_{Hegel images used with the kind permission of the artist, Helena Wilcox}

Watch

Author Terry Pinkard discusses Hegel's relevance today, how our understanding of Hegel has changed as well as his own distinctive readings of Hegel's philosophy, key elements of his work and which interpretations of Hegel's work he identifies with. 

         

Explore

Browse our themed collections of articles and book chapters.