Hegel on the Life of the Mind

This book is a study of Hegel’s philosophy of mind, which is explored in its integrity as an account of embodied cognition that includes a novel approach to the ethics of self-cultivation.

Drawing on Hegel’s three editions of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (1817, 1827, 1830), the Berlin lectures on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, and contemporary studies on the phenomenology of remembering and ethical memory, the author shows that Hegel’s philosophy of mind disrupts entrenched dualisms—between feeling and thought, and between sanity and mental illness—through a developmental approach grounded in the unifying role of memory. On this basis, the book puts forward an ethics of psychological integrity, one that pursues self-improvement through openness to change and conflict. Finally, the study provides a critical framework for rethinking collective memory and the ethics of remembering.

Hegel on the Life of the Mind illuminates the continuing relevance of Hegel's philosophy for contemporary discussions of embodied cognition, memory, and moral psychology.