Special 1-Day Seminar On G.W.F. Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic (and more!)

an opportunity to work through Hegel's complex ideas with an expert guide

This coming Saturday, I’m trying out a new type of online event. It is a 1-day seminar, comprising three 90-minute lecture and discussion sessions, with 30-minute breaks in between. It should offer an opportunity for me to lead participants through some interesting and influential ideas, originally articulated in G.W.F. Hegel’s early work, The Phenomenology of Spirit.

Here’s the online site where you can enroll in the seminar. I’ll be providing participants with a number of relevant and useful resources in that course site hosted in my Study With Sadler online academy.

The topic this seminar centers on is Hegel’s famous “master-slave dialectic” found early on in the Self-Consciousness section of the Phenomenology. We will be looking at that part of the work very closely, but we’ll also be examining the rest of the Self-Consciousness section and some later portions of the work. The goal is to put the key ideas from the master-slave dialectic into a broader and fuller context.

Since the master-slave dialectic has drawn a lot of commentary and interpretations, we will also be discussing a selection of takes on it developed by other important philosophers, mainly in 20th century Francophone philosophy.

Here’s the schedule for the seminar, taking place on Saturday, January 18:

9:00 AM CST - Part 1: Self-Consciousness and the Master-Slave Dialectic

We will be discussing the following topics in this part:

• Self-Consciousness And Other (Self Consciousness)

• Desire As Central To Life and Self-Consciousness

• The Meaning and Value of Recognition

• The Struggle To The (Non-)Death

• Putting The Slave To Work

• Transformation Of World, Objects, and Self

• Death As Ultimate Master

11:00 AM CST - Part 2: Selected Interpretations and Incorporations of the Master-Slave Dialectic

We will be discussing the following topics in this part:

• Does it really make sense to look to Karl Marx? Martin Buber? Martin Heidegger

• Commentators important in the French scene: Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite

• Selected French interpretations/integrations: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon

1:00 PM CST - Part 3: Going Beyond the Master-Slave Dialectic In The Phenomenology

We will be finishing up the seminar by discussing the following topics in this part:

• The Rest of the Self-Consciousness section: Stoicism And Skepticism, The Unhappy Consciousness

• More developed forms of Recognition within The Phenomenology

Students enrolled in this seminar are free to attend and participate in as many or as few sessions as they would like to while it is running. We will be recording each of the sessions, and students retain lifetime access to the recordings and resources, so they can always go back over the discussions at their leisure.

There are no prerequisites for enrolling and participating in this special seminar. All that’s needed is an interest in the topic, a willingness to think together about these matters along with Hegel, and a desire to join the lectures and discussions.

If you’d like to learn more about this valuable open-access educational opportunity, I’ve produced a short video about the seminar which you can certainly watch. I hope you’ll consider joining the students already enrolled and joining us on Saturday!