Several of the essays are on Goethe.

C.P. Snow's notion of a possible ""third nation"" in which the literary and the scientific culture interact has been explored in new ways by theorists on both sides of the divide. This text presents their theories.

Hegel famously argues that his speculative method is a foundation for claims about socio-political reality within a wider philosophical system. This systematic approach is thought a superior alternative to all other ways of philosophical thinking. Hegel's method and system have normative significance for understanding everything from ethics to the state. Hegel's approach has attracted much debate among scholars about key philosophical questions - and controversy about his proposed answers to them. Is his method and system open to the charge of dogmatism? Are his claims about the rationality of monarchy, unequal gender relations, an unelected second parliamentary chamber and a corporation-based economy beyond revision? This ground-breaking collection of new essays by leading interpreters of Hegel's philosophy is dedicated to the questions that surround Hegel's philosophical method and its relationship to the conclusions of his political philosophy. It contributes to the on-going debate about the importance of a systematic context for political philosophy, the relationship between theoretical and practical philosophy, and engages with contemporary discussions about the shape of a rational social order.

In this book, Westphal offers an original interpretation of Hegel’s moral philosophy. Building on his previous study of the role of natural law in Hume’s and Kant’s accounts of justice, Westphal argues that Hegel developed and justified a robust form of civic republicanism. Westphal identifies, for the first time, the proper genre to which Hegel’s Philosophical Outlines of Justice belongs and to which it so prodigiously contributes, which he calls Natural Law Constructivism, an approach developed by Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. He brings to bear Hegel’s adoption and augmentation of Kant’s Critique of rational judgment and justification in all non-formal domains to his moral philosophy in his Outlines. Westphal argues that Hegel’s justification for the standards of political legitimacy successfully integrates Rousseau’s Independence Requirement into the role of public reason within a constitutional republic. In these regards, Hegel’s moral and political principles are progressive not only in principle, but also in practice. Hegel’s Civic Republicanism will be of interest to scholars of moral philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, Hegel, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy.