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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Excerpts from Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817)

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#6.
Philosophy is the encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences, insofar as its entire scope is presented through the specific differentiation of its parts, and it is a philosophical encyclopedia insofar as the differentiation and the connection of its parts are presented according to the necessity of the concept.

Since philosophy is rational knowledge throughout, each of its parts is a philosophical whole, a circle of totality containing itself within itself, but the philosophical idea is also within each particular determinacy or element. The individual circle thus ruptures itself because it is in itself a totality, it breaks through the limit of its own elements and establishes another sphere. The whole presents itself then as a circle of circles in which each circle is a necessary moment, so that the system of its characteristic elements constitutes the whole idea, which also appears in each individual part.

#7.
Philosophy is also essentially encyclopedic, since the true can only exist as totality, and only through the differentiation and determination of its differences can it be the necessity of totality and the freedom of the whole. It is, therefore, necessarily systematic.

Philosophizing without a system can not be scientific. Moreover, if it expresses for itself primarily a subjective perspective its contents are contingent. For the contents are only justified as a moment of the whole, and outside of the whole rest on ungrounded presuppositions or have only subjective certainty.

#8.
It is a mistake to confuse a system of philosophy with a philosophy that is derived from a single principle. On the contrary, the principle of true philosophy contains all particular principles in itself. Philosophy demonstrates this both in itself and in its history: on the one hand, the philosophies that appear different in history are only one philosophy at different stages of development; and on the other hand, the particular principles that underlie particular systems are only branches of one and the same whole.

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