"In the early decades of the nineteenth century, G. W. F. Hegel believed that philosophy was finally in position to achieve something it had strived for since Ancient Greece: becoming an objective, demonstrative science. Like many in the modern period, Hegel thought that philosophy needed to be a unified system if it was to become a "science" in a classical, rationalist sense. In Hegels Sole Idea, Mark Alznauer reads Hegels mature philosophical system as an effort to transform ordinary representations and scientific concepts into true philosophical comprehension. Hegel thought that if philosophy was to achieve its traditional aims, it must reconceive all of reality through a single absolute idea, just as, to use his favorite metaphor, the oak tree is already contained in the acorn. Hegel sets out this idea in his ambitious project, the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, which came to be regarded as the last best hope of philosophy as an autonomous, fully rational science.

But while Hegel thought the Encyclopedia was the successful realization of philosophy, some of his contemporaries thought it showed the exhaustion and collapse of that project. Hegels Sole Idea offers an interpretation of Hegels full philosophy that allows a fair confrontation with his most provocative and ambitious claims"-- Provided by publisher.