SOURCE: Lauer, Quentin. “The Hegelian System.” In Hegel's Idea of Philosophy, pp. 1-14. New York: Fordham University Press, 1971.

In the following essay, Lauer outlines Hegel's philosophical system and provides an overview of his works.

The Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy is particularly significant, as we have already noted in our Preface, because of the place which it holds in the overall “system” which Hegel's philosophy purports to be. What that place is can be clarified in an attempt to sketch the system as a whole, which is at once Hegel's philosophy and his reply to those who would discredit the whole metaphysical endeavor.

In an attempt to overcome the abstract speculations of both traditional Scholasticism and continental rationalism, the British empiricists in general, and Hume in particular, insisted on the primacy of the immediate presence of reality in sensation. In this context, then, thinking...