Born at Jonzac, France, Jean Hyppolite had an illustrious university career: professor at Université de Strasbourg in 1945; at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1949; director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1954; and finally, the chair at the Collège de France in "Histoire des systèmes" from 1963 until his death. He belonged to the post–World War II generation of French philosophers that included Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Lacan. However, Hyppolite's most enduring legacy is his students from the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault.

Hyppolite became famous as the French translator of Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit in 1941. He then produced a commentary, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in 1947. In many essays, Hyppolite recounts the French reception of Hegel. The French reception had first been formed by Jean Wahl, but...