'In effect the book constitutes an elaborate defense of the hermeneutical approach to philosophy through its carefully crafted elaboration of how hermeneutical thought grows out of the project of idealism. One of its real strengths is its development of certain key ideas in Hegelian thought and its attempt to take Hegel seriously while nonetheless avoiding his mistakes. In Bubner's interpretation hermeneutical thought thus completes the idealist project in a way analogous to that in which Hegel claimed to have completed the projects of his idealist predecessors … It has few counterparts in either the German or English language literature on the subject. It is far more philosophically sophisticated than the older intellectual histories of the subject.' Terry Pinkard, Northwestern University and author of Hegel: A Biography

• Part I. System: 1. Schelling's discovery and Schleiermacher's appropriation of Plato; 2. Aristotle and Schelling on the question of God; 3. Hegel's science of logic: the completion or the sublation of metaphysics?; 4. Hegel's political anthropology; Part II. History: 5. Transcendental philosophy and the problem of history; 6. Hegel's concept of phenomenology; 7. Rousseau, Hegel and the dialectic of enlightenment; 8. Closure and the understanding of history; Part III. Aesthetics: 9. From Fichte to Schlegel; 10. The dialectical significance of romantic irony; 11. Is there a hegelian theory of aesthetic experience?; 12. Hegel and Goethe.