This book provides a critical analysis of Hegel’s Anthropology, a long-neglected treatise dedicated to the psyche, or “soul,” that bridges Hegel’s philosophy of organic nature with his philosophy of subjective spirit. Allegra de Laurentiis recuperates this overlooked text, guiding readers through its   essential arguments and ideas. She shows how Hegel conceives of the “sublation” of natural motion, first into animal sentience and then into the felt presentiment of selfhood, all the way to the threshold of self-reflexive thinking. She discusses the Anthropology in the context of Hegel’s mature system of philosophy (the Encyclopaedia) while also exposing some of the scientific and philosophical sources of his conceptions of unconscious states, psychosomatism, mental pathologies, skill formation, memorization, bodily habituation, and the self-conditioning capacities of our species. This treatise on the becoming of anthropos, she argues, displays the power and limitations of Hegel’s idealistic “philosophy of the real” in connecting such phenomena as erect posture, a discriminating hand, and the forward gaze to the emergence of the human ego, or the structural disintegration of the social world to the derangement of the individual mind.
 
A groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on Hegel and nineteenth-century philosophy, this book shows that the Anthropology is essential to understanding Hegel’s concept of spirit, not only in its connection with nature but also in its more sophisticated realizations as objective and absolute spirit. Future scholarship on this subject will recount—and build upon—de Laurentiis’s innovative study.

Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit has been one of the most important works of philosophy since the nineteenth century, while the question of energy has been crucial to life in the twenty-first century. In this book, Michael Marder integrates the two, narrating a story about the trials and tribulations of energy embedded in Hegel’s dialectics. Through an original interpretation of actuality (Wirklichkeit) as energy in the Hegelian corpus, the book provides an exciting lens for understanding the dialectical project and the energy‑starved condition of our contemporaneity. To elaborate this theory, Marder undertakes a meticulous rereading of major parts of the Phenomenology, where the energy deficit of mere consciousness gives way to the energy surplus of self‑consciousness and its self‑delimitation in the domain of reason. In so doing, he denounces the current understanding of energy as pure potentiality, linking this mindset to pollution, profit-driven economies, and environmental crises. Surprising and deeply engaged with its contemporary implications, this book doesn’t simply illuminate aspects of The Phenomenology of Spirit—it provides an entirely new understanding of Hegel’s ideas.