Today Hegel research and the editing of Hegel are pursued both intensively and extensively. Why this should be so is not immediately clear. The emergence of the complex "Hegel research" is certainly not to be explained merely by the fact that today scientific interest extends to all possible subjects. The attempt both to make Hegel's writings available in a complete edition and to research them with historical philology cannot have that relative indifference to the concerns of the present with which a germanist might edit a medieval text or an orientalist investigate an obscure language. (Though, to be sure, in this indifference or equanimity there can lie hidden a passionate commitment to the universal desire to know and an effort to preserve for it a free space not plotted and superintended by society.) Hegel research has participated directly in the attempt of our time to understand itself. For this has entailed philosophizing, and thus, the development of philosophy both with the aid of Hegel and in opposition to him. How is philosophy practiced in today's shrinking world? And what is Hegel's place in this philosophizing?