In Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit, Michael N. Forster advances an original reading of the work. His approach differs from that of previous scholars in two main ways: he reads the work, first, as a whole - not piecemeal, as it has usually been analyzed - and second, within the context of Hegel's broader corpus and the thought of other philosophers.

Forster's reading reveals the Phenomenology of Spirit as in fact an impressively coherent text containing a rich array of ideas of extraordinary philosophical originality and depth.

These ideas include a diagnosis of the ills of modernity in terms of its entanglement in a series of dualisms, and a project for overcoming them; a sweeping naturalism; a deep rethinking of and response to problems of skepticism; subtle arguments for social theories of meaning and truth; and a family of ideas based on the insight that human thought changes in fundamental ways over the course of history.