Donald Phillip Verene is the author of Vico's Science of Imagination and is editor of Symbol, Myth and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935-1945, and editor of Hegel's Social and Political Thought, among other works. He is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Emory University.

Donald Phillip Verene has advanced a completely new reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. He shows that the philosophic meaning of this work depends as much on Hegel's use of metaphor and image as it does on Hegel's dialectical and discursive descriptions of various stages of consciousness. The focus is on Hegel's concept of recollection (Erinnerung). Consciousness confronts itself with the aim of achieving absolute knowing.
This is the first commentary to regard metaphor, irony, and memory as keys to the understanding of Hegel's basic philosophical position.