Getting Started: Who Am I, and the First Paragraphs of Sense Certainty
I am a curious layman, WEIRD , and a cafeteria Catholic (Catholicism is too rich for any mortal to ingest all of it). Go elsewhere for more educated opinions. This will be a conversation with the text of Phenomenlogy of Spirit , translated by A.V. Miller . I'm skipping the preface and introduction: after saying "It is customary to preface a work with an explanation of the author's aim, why he wrote the book, and the relationship in which he believes it to stand to other earlier or contemporary treatises on the same subject. In the case of a philosophical work, however, such an explanation seems not only superflouous but, in view of the nature of the subject matter, even inappropriate and misleading.", Hegel goes on to present a cliff wall of undefined terms and references to prior works, including Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant. Some of those authors are not named, but I can recognize some of the concepts as belonging to ...