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In the introduction to his Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel states that a person’s possession of ‘self-conscious rationality [selbstbewuكter Vernünftigkeit]’ cannot have arisen spontaneously or solely from the person’s present circumstances (VGP 13: 12). It is, Hegel claims, an historical achievement inherited from previous generations.1 By ‘self-conscious rationality’ Hegel means self-reflexive thought or thought that is about itself. One reason Hegel claims that self-reflexive thought is historical is that, in the first instance, it must be about thought that is not self-reflexive, i.e. it is about something other than thought, e.g. nature. And thought that is about nature is historically conditioned. It employs concepts and inferential moves that have been learned from previous generations and is informed by the histories of, e.g., the natural sciences and human interaction with nature. Philosophy, according to Hegel, is a product of self-reflexive thought and thus would also seem to be historical. It would seem, as Hegel puts it, ‘that our philosophy can only come into existence in connection with previous philosophy, from which of necessity it has arisen’ (VGP 13: 14; LHP 1: 3–4 – translation modified). Yet Hegel states that the claim that philosophy is historical, and the very subject of the history of philosophy, which presupposes this claim, appears to contain an ‘inner contradiction’ (VGP 13: 19; LHP 1: 7). Philosophy is often claimed to discover and present eternal and unchanging truths. History, however, does not deliver one philosophy or even many concordant philosophies, each adding to a coherent system of truths. ‘It seems merely to afford’, Hegel asserts, ‘the spectacle of ever-recurring changes in the whole, such as finally are no longer even connected by a common aim’ (VGP 13: 22; LHP 1: 10). History delivers many systems, with the proponents of each claiming theirs to be the one true philosophy and the others to be false.2 It would thus seem that there can be no history of philosophy but only a history of conflicting ‘opinions [Meinungen]’ (VGP 13: 22; LHP 1: 11) or what may otherwise be called a history of ideas. In his unique style, Hegel explains that if we take the self-proclaimed philosophers of the past at their word, then the history of philosophy becomes ‘a kingdom not merely formed of dead and lifeless individuals, but of refuted and spiritually dead [geistig vergangener] systems, since each has killed and buried the other’ (VGP 13: 29; LHP 17).