Michael Allen Fox

I earned a BA is Philosophy without reading a word of Hegel--I was so taken with Nietzsche/Kierkegaard/Schopenhauer that I adopted their scorn as my own and held onto it for decades. A chance comment by my daughter made me reconsider, thus, this book.

How do I know, though, if this book is any good if I haven't read the original? It's written well, a little too chatty for my taste in places, but coherent throughout and where it isn't clear it could be that the source material is impossible. Fox covers the main points in Hegel's main books by going through them sequentially, pointing out main themes, inconsistencies, areas of particular difficulty and impacts that Hegel's ideas have had on subsequent thinkers, so as a survey this is pretty good. Unless he's dead wrong about what the man meant--either way, I'll have to come back and revise my rating, no doubt.

The Kindle edition does not have hyperlinked footnotes, which is a bother, but the notes are at the end of each chapter rather than the end of the book. The text is left- and right-justified, which I find hard to read but not impossible. There are few illustrations and they don't suffer in the translation to electronic format.… (altro)