In the winter semester of 1816/17, Hegel lectured in Heidelberg on the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences and soon afterward—in June 1817—published an outline of his system under this title. Hegel’s student and biographer, Karl Rosenkranz, wrote about this: “This first edition of the Encyclopaedia still fully bears the creative breath of its initial production. Later editions became much more detailed in the treatment of specifics, especially in the polemical and apologetic notes; but to grasp Hegel’s system in its concentrated totality, as it emerged with the full force of its original appearance, one must always return to this first edition, and thus it will always need to be reprinted.”
Despite this recommendation, the first edition of the Encyclopaedia has, until now, only been available through a reprographic reprint by Hermann Glockner; in the present volume, it is published for the first time with a critical edition, accompanied by an editorial report and annotations.
Hegel had bound his own hand copies of the first edition with inserted pages that were richly annotated. The volume on the Philosophy of Spirit has been preserved: the notes are critically edited here, and the edited text is contrasted with facsimiles of the manuscript pages, giving the reader a vivid impression of the often very complex arrangement of these notes in relation to each other.
Additionally, this volume includes fragments of Hegel’s manuscripts for his lectures on logic and metaphysics, on the philosophy of nature, and on anthropology and psychology, allowing readers to trace his progressive development of these disciplines, along with Hegel’s dictations on the Encyclopaedia from the summer semester of 1818.
Now, all three editions of the Encyclopaedia are available in a critical edition (GW 13, 19, and 20). To facilitate use, GW 13 includes a concordance aligning the paragraphs of the first edition with those of the second edition.
Simon Gros 
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