The Routledge Guidebook to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (The Routledge Guides to the Great Books)

If you've ever written something, shall we say, in an altered state of consciousness, then spent the next day trying to decode your transcendent insights, you might understand why somewhere around page 150 of the Phenomenology I decided it was time to reach for a crib. Professor Stern manages, in around 250 pages or so, not only to explicate Hegel's curious masterwork, but to set it within the historical context of its time of composition and to connect it to Hegel's previous and subsequent writings. It doesn't necessarily make reading the Phenomenology itself a whole lot easier, but just when you find yourself drowning there's suddenly a lighted buoy somewhere on the horizon.

This book places Hegel in the mainstream of German Idealism. It is keyed to a good translation. For these reasons it helped me understand Hegel.

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