SOURCE: Ware, Robert Bruce. “Hegel's Metaphilosophy and Historical Metamorphosis.” In Hegel: The Logic of Self-consciousness and the Legacy of Subjective Freedom, pp. 7-32. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Ware addresses misperceptions of Hegel's views of philosophy and the philosophy of history.

Hegel is commonly understood to have required that the philosophy of history must be retrospective and therefore fundamentally conservative. Yet at the same time he is thought to have claimed that his system involved an absolute truth beyond which no philosophy could advance, and that it therefore marked the end of the history of philosophy. The two claims are evidently inconsistent, since a history of philosophy, which must be bound by constraints on the philosophy of history, could not legitimately comment on philosophy's future. If this is the result of Hegel's metaphilosophy then he has contributed at least this much to his reputation for...