History of Philosophy in a Format of Lecture Notes (on Hegel G.W.F. Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik. Vorlesungsmitschrift Adolf Heimann (1828/1829). Hrsg. von A. P. Olivier und A. Gethmann-Siefert. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2017. XXXI + 254 S.)

Abstract

Released last year, the book “G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik. Vorlesungsmitschrift Adolf Heimann (1828/1829)” in German is a publication of one of the student’s manuskript of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics. Adolf Heimann was a student of Hegel in 1828/29. These notes open for us imaginary doors into the audience of the Berlin University, where Hegel read his fourth and final course on the philosophy of art. A distinctive feature of this course is a new structure of lectures in comparison with three previous courses. This three-part division was took by H.G. Hotho as the basis for the edited by him text “Lectures on Aesthetics”, included in the first collection of Hegel’s works. The content of that publication was mainly based on the lectures of 1823 and 1826. There are a number of differences between the analyzed published manuskript and the students’ records of 1820/21, 1823 and 1826, as well as between the manuskript and the editorial version of H.G. Hotho. These features show that Hegel throughout all four series of Berlin lectures on the philosophy of art actively developed and revised the structure and content of aesthetics. But unfortunately this evidence of the permanent development was not taken into account by the first editor of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics.