‘Metaphilosophy’ in Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy

The article aspires to delineate the relation between Hegel’s concept of philosophy and the overarching structure of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy . It sets a fourfold goal. First, to locate the proper position of the history of philosophy in Hegel’s system; second, to reconstruct Hegel’s argument for the necessary historicity of philosophy; third, to showcase the distinctive and, hitherto, underappreciated function of Hegel’s Lectures in the substantiation of his ‘metaphilosophy’; fourth, to identify, arguably for the first time, the five distinctive methodological principles, on the metaphilosophical basis of which, Hegel is organizing the material of the Lectures and the history of philosophy as a whole.