Hegel’s fame is based on his lectures in Berlin, which are here in a critically edited version in the second part of the Gesammelten Werke (Collected Works). The edition begins with the Lectures on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit (1822), and the edition of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Right (1817) follows.
Hegel’s great impact on his contemporaries was not so much due to the reception of his previously published works, but rather through his lectures at the University of Berlin, to which he was appointed in 1818 and where he set the tone until his death in 1831. Accordingly, his students in the Freunde Edition, established in 1832, gave great importance to the lectures and integrated them into the collected works through compilations of Hegel’s posthumous manuscripts and various student notes.
For the edition of the lectures in the historically critical edition of the Gesammelten Werke, the principle of “freehand” compilation of a main text from various source texts, which was followed by the editors of the Freunde Edition—likely due to the time period—can no longer be applied. Therefore, the second part of the GW, which will comprise volumes 23 to 31, presents the authentic wording of all surviving transcripts of the lectures given by Hegel, providing a secure foundation for research.
With the Lectures on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit (Volume 25), the first volume of the second part of the Gesammelten Werke is now published. It contains the lecture transcripts from the summer semester of 1822 (Heinrich Gustav Hotho) and the summer semester of 1825 (K. G. J. v. Griesheim with variants from the transcripts of F. C. H. V. von Kehler and Moritz Pinder). In these lectures, Hegel deals with the development of the concepts from the first part of the philosophy of spirit, whose systematic tripartition (Anthropology, Doctrine of Consciousness, Psychology) he had worked out in the first edition of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817).
What is striking is how Hegel critically processes a large part of the contemporary literature on the then-popular and much-discussed topics—such as racial theory, animal magnetism, the phenomena of psychosomatic illnesses, pedagogy, and so-called mental illnesses—in anthropology, and how he counters the emerging tendencies toward positivistic and reductionist scientific developments with his own independent framework.
Simon Gros 
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