This book is a study of Hegel’s philosophy of mind, which is explored in its integrity as an account of embodied cognition that includes a novel approach to the ethics of self-cultivation.

Drawing on Hegel’s three editions of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (1817, 1827, 1830), the Berlin lectures on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, and contemporary studies on the phenomenology of remembering, the author shows that Hegel’s philosophy of mind disrupts entrenched dualisms—such as between meaning and truth, feeling and thought, or sanity and mental illness—through a developmental view of cognition that is grounded in the unifying role of memory. On this basis, the book shows that Hegel’s philosophy of mind puts forward an ethics of psychological integrity, which pursues practical self-determination through the integration of feeling, thinking, and acting. Finally, the study provides a framework for rethinking the moral relevance of remembering, the unity of cognition and action, and the value of freedom for subjective agency.

Hegel on the Life of the Mind illuminates the continuing relevance of Hegel’s philosophy for contemporary discussions of embodied cognition and moral psychology.

Elisa Magrì is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, USA. She specializes in German Idealism and twentieth-century phenomenology. She is the co-author of Critical Phenomenology: An Introduction (2022) and Co-Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology.