Half Hour Hegel Hits #100

One of the projects I started a bit over two years back - Half Hour Hegel - has crossed an important threshold.  The video lectures I've been creating, engaging in paragraph by paragraph commentary on G.W.F. Hegel's notoriously difficult Phenomenology of Spirit, now number in the triple digits.

With video #100, we're now just at the beginning of a lengthy section of the work, Reason (the second-longest portion of the text). We've gone through the Preface, the Introduction, the Consciousness section, and the Self-Consciousness section (which includes the famous Master-Slave dialectic).  So, although we're still early in the project as a whole, there's a pretty substantive digital commentary publicly available - for free - to anyone who has access to an internet connection and YouTube.

There are, of course (and thankfully!) some engaged fans and supporters who financially underwrite some of the work involved, through the Patreon site I set up to crowdfund this effort (if you'd like to see what's involved in creating one of these videos, here's one that I created walking viewers through the process).

It's quite a massive commitment and undertaking, likely to take me at least another three years of hard work to see through to the very end.  But, it's not only a project I view as an enjoyable challenge, but also hope will provide a useful commentary that will assist people in studying Hegel for decades to come.

Starting the Master-Slave Dialectic

More than a year-and-a half-in, the Half-Hour Hegel project continues on strong!  I've just released the 74th installation in this video lecture series -- aimed at providing an innovative, open-access, digital commentary on G.W.F Hegel's first major work, the notoriously difficult Phenomenology of Spirit.

I usually provide updates about the project and matters Hegel-related on the Half-Hour Hegel blog, but since the Master-Slave dialectic is a particularly popular selection from the work -- and that's what we're about to start --  I thought it would be worthwhile to mention it here in Orexis Dianoētikē.

If you're interested specifically in that section of the work here's the video lectures so far from the "Lordship and Bondage" portion:

• Phenomenology of Spirit, sec. 178-181
• Phenomenology of Spirit, sec. 182-184
• Phenomenology of Spirit, sec. 185-187  

If you'd like to see the other videos from the Self-Consciousness portion that the Master-Slave dialectic fits into, I suggest going over to this page on the Half-Hour Hegel blog, where all the video lectures are curated as soon as I shoot, edit, upload, and release them. 

Next week, you can expect to see videos specifically discussing the paragraphs in which Hegel elaborates the Master-Slave dialectic proper -- if you follow me on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, I'll announce their releases there, as well as on my YouTube channel, the Half Hour Hegel Patreon page, and the Half Hour Hegel blog.

Half-Hour Hegel Series: Ready for Sense Certainty

For nearly a year, I've been engaged in a rather long-term and massive project which I don't think I've mentioned previously here on this blog -- the Half Hour Hegel video series.  By the end of December, I'd managed to make it to a minor milestone -- small in comparison, that is, to the amount of work that is still waiting to be done! -- I'd shot, edited, and released all of the videos for the Preface and the Introduction to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's early masterwork, the Phenomenology of Spirit.

The general idea behind the series (the motivations for which I'll discuss in more detail below) was that I would go through the entire text, paragraph by paragraph, first reading and then commenting on each paragraph (there's a from over 800 total) in turn.   The 70-odd-paragraph Preface -- famous for, among other things, asserting the impossibility of actually providing a preface to any genuinely philosophical work -- ended up taking me 31 total lectures -- around 15.5 hours.  The much shorter and more straightforward Introduction required just 7 lectures -- 3.5 hours.