The volume contains all the remaining notes and excerpts from books, journals, and newspapers by Hegel from the years 1809 to 1831, primarily from his time in Berlin.
Hegel had already compiled extensive excerpts from the literature he read during his gymnasium years and had kept them permanently, referring to them as the “incunabula of his education,” as Karl Rosenkranz aptly called them in his biography of Hegel from 1844.
Nearly half (113) of the notes and excerpts still available today come from the part of Hegel’s estate retained by Karl Rosenkranz in Königsberg, which was made available to him by Hegel’s widow and sons for the purpose of writing the biography. In this way, these materials escaped the so-called reductions of the estate carried out by Hegel’s sons. Seventy-three manuscripts were directly handed over with Hegel’s estate to the Royal Library in Berlin and are now part of the estate of the Berlin State Library (Preußischer Kulturbesitz), and a further 14 have been added over the years. In addition to these two main collections, this volume of the Collected Works also publishes manuscripts from the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, private collections, the Munich State Library, and the Hegel Archive in Bochum.
For research and recognition of his life’s work, the late excerpts from the Berlin period, when Hegel reached the height of his influence, are of invaluable importance. They show how attentively he registered and assessed everything that appeared in the newspapers, illustrating how close he was to the spirit of his time, from which the verdict arises that “philosophy captures its time in thoughts.“
Simon Gros 
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