Watch The Half Hour Hegel: A Long, Guided Tour Through Hegel’s Phenomenology, Passage by Passage

Big books can be daunt­ing. Big, com­pli­cat­ed books can seem insur­mount­able, espe­cial­ly if you’re try­ing to read them on your own. How many of you have tried to read Joyce’s Ulysses’ and bailed out with­in 30 pages? Raise your hands. Well, per­haps you’ll be pleased to learn about Frank Delaney’s Re:Joyce pod­cast, which, since 2012, has been tak­ing lis­ten­ers on a slow walk through Joyce’s mas­ter­piece, some­times sen­tence by sen­tence. Episode 273 has just been post­ed, which fea­tures Delaney unpack­ing a scene in “Hades,” or what amounts to Chap­ter 6. By my count, Frank has only cov­ered about 15% of the book. So it’s hard­ly too late to jump in.

If you’re look­ing to work your way through anoth­er bear of a book, give Hegel’s Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy of the Spir­it a try. Writ­ten in 1807, the Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy had a pro­found effect on the devel­op­ment of Ger­man and West­ern phi­los­o­phy, and it’s a noto­ri­ous­ly dif­fi­cult read. That’s where the Youtube series “Half Hour Hegel” comes in handy. Cre­at­ed by Gre­go­ry Sadler, a philoso­pher by train­ing, the series fea­tures “25–35 minute YouTube videos lead­ing stu­dents through the entire text of G.W.F. Hegel’s Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy of Spir­it, para­graph by para­graph, engag­ing in a close read­ing of the text with­out skip­ping any of the mate­r­i­al.”

You can find 67 videos so far (watch the playlist above), cov­er­ing 5 main por­tions of the text: the Pref­ace (lec­tures 1–31), the Intro­duc­tion (lec­tures 32–38), Sense-Cer­tain­ty (lec­tures 39–44), Per­cep­tion (lec­tures 45–51), and Force and the Under­stand­ing (lec­tures 52–65).”  By the end of the project, there will be rough­ly 300 videos in the series. You can keep tabs on the video playlist here. And you can sup­port Sadler’s work over on his Patre­on page.

Oth­er cours­es on Hegel can be found on our list of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro to G.W.F. Hegel, and Every­thing Else You Want­ed to Know About the Daunt­ing Ger­man Philoso­pher

How Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Used Hegel, Kant & Niet­zsche to Over­turn Seg­re­ga­tion in Amer­i­ca