Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), his first major work, is one of the classics of Western philosophy. Although previous translations, in whole or in part, have made the text available in English, they are for various reasons not fully adequate, especially for use in teaching undergraduates. Howard Kainz has therefore undertaken to provide his own translation of major selections from the work, which are tied together by summaries of the parts not translated so as to provide the reader with a sense of the whole.

The translated selections include the Introduction, Chapter I on Sensory-Certainty, the sections from Chapter IV on Self-Consciousness, the Master-Slave dialectic, and the Unhappy Consciousness, the introductory section to Chapter V on Reason, the sections in Chapter VI on Ethical Action, Absolute Liberty, and Shiftiness (Verstellung) and the central argument of Chapter VIII on Absolute Knowledge.

The translation is based on the 1980 "Akademie" edition of the Phänomenologie des Geistes (Band 9 of the Gesammelte Werke), edited by Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heede, and the German original is printed alongside the English translation in parallel columns (by permission of the German publisher, Felix Meiner Verlag).

This edition includes some of the editorial devices used by De Negri in his Italian translation and Hippolyte in his French translation―namely, the use of editorial subdivisions and subtitles to indicate major transitions in the text, plus commentary and cross-references by way of footnotes.

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