Problem of Nature in Hegel's Final System

Wes Furlotte critically evaluates Hegel's philosophy of human freedom in terms of his often-disregarded conception of nature. In doing so, he gives us a new portrait of Hegel's final system that is surprisingly relevant for our contemporary world, connecting it with recent work in speculative realism and new materialism.Furlotte offers a sophisticated sense of the fundamental materialism permeating Hegel s concept of freedom and how the former serves as the inescapable precondition of subjectivity and social history. He also reveals how material nature and culture s reactions to it problematize human freedom even threaten it with utter annihilation. This book forces us to reconsider accepted accounts of Hegel s system and to re-evaluate what Hegel, and German Idealism, might still offer us today.