Hegelianism in the 21st Century
In German bookstores, the Continental Idealists and even minor philosophers and writers will have "Hauptwerke" or "Major Works" that systematically organize an author's works, usually chronologically. In English, these are less common, and there are many major authors who do not have such a system. Nietzsche and some other authors do, but many major figures have only individual works translated in different decades and styles.
When studying Hegel, it was difficult to figure out exactly how many original works he had because of the variety of translations into English that a single work would have. His Lesser Logic in the Encyclopedia would be incorrectly called "The Science of Logic" or "Hegel's Logic" in English. Writers have called the Phenomenology "Hegel's Philosophy of Mind" and other bizarre translations. Many of these translations are severely truncated (most likely due to printing costs), have no modern English translation. Some only have 19th century British translations, and they are not good. So I set out to create a brand new translation of all his major works from the original Franktur texts, unabridged and faithful to the text. And I wanted to make them bilingual so that the original text could be referenced, which is also a first.
It started with the identification of the original printings. These are the 1st editions of Hegel in the Hegelhaus in Stuttgart, Germany. The scans of these are available in the public domain from the city library. The original script was transliterated into modern German using an open-source script from Transcribus. From there, the actual spelling of the words was updated. Hegel's 200-year-old German is not as difficult as Luther's 500-year-old spelling, but there are still some differences. "Dasein" was spelled "Daseyn" back then, and so on.
In some versions, especially his lectures, the same work was printed by different publishers even during Hegel's lifetime, so that a decision had to be made as to which version to use and which minor works to include. His Jena Writings, for example, were published posthumously. Exactly which notebooks to include is a matter of editorial discretion.
