Hegel And Religious Faith

As the title indicates, Faith and Knowledge deals with the relation between religious faith and cognitive beliefs, between the truth of religion and the truths of philosophy and science. Hegel is guided by his understanding of the historical situation: the individual alienated from God, nature, and community; and he is influenced by the new philosophy of Schelling, the Spinozistic Philosophy of Identity with its superb vision of the inner unity of God, nature, and rational man. Through a brilliant discussion of the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, and other luminaries of the period, Hegel shows that the time has finally come to give philosophy the authentic shape it has always been trying to reach, a shape in which philosophy’s old conflicts with religion on the one hand and with the sciences on the other are suspended once for all. This is the first English translation of this important essay. Professor H. S. Harris offers a historical and analytic commentary to the text and Professor Cerf offers an introduction to the general reader which focuses on the concept of intellectual intuition and on the difference between authentic and inauthentic philosophy.

This polemical advocacy of Hegel's religious thought. It presents Hegel's religious thought as a living, still urgent challenge for today and confronts the major theological and philosophical objections to Hegel in a fresh way.

For Hegel, thought is not philosophical if it is not also religious. Both religion and philosophy have a common object and share the same content, for both are concerned with the inherent unity of all things. Hegel’s doctrine of God provides the means for understanding this fundamental relationship. Although Hegel stated that God is absolute Spirit and Christianity is the absolute religion, the compatibility of Hegel’s doctrine of God with Christian theology has been a matter of continuing and closely argued debate. Williamson’s book provides a significant contribution to this ongoing discussion through a systematic study of Hegel’s concept of God. The book proceeds by investigating theism, atheism, pantheism, and panentheism as descriptions of Hegel’s concept. It rejects the view that Hegel’s doctrine so differs from Christian theology so as to be empty of religious content and thereby highlights some important considerations in contemporary theology.

This study is an attempt to examine the relationships between religious belief and the humanism of the Enlightenment in the philosophy of Hegel and of a group of thinkers who related to his thought in various ways during the 1840's. It begins with a study of the ways in which Hegel attempted to evolve a genuinely Christian humanism by his demonstration that the modern understanding of man as a free and rational subject derived its strength and validity from the union of God and human existence in the incarnation. The rest of this study is con cerned with two different forms of opposition to Hegel: first, the criti cal discipleship of the Young Hegelians and Moses Hess, who insisted that Hegel's notion of Christian humanism was false because religious belief was necessarily inimical to a clear consciousness of social evil and the determination to abolish it; second, the religious opposition to the Enlightenment in the thought of Schelling and Kierkegaard, which emphasized God's transcendence to human reason and the insig nificance of secular history. In the years leading up to the revolution of 1848, Hegel's synthesis was rejected in favour of the assertion of atheistic humanism or religious otherworldliness. Chapter One, after discussing the young Hegel's critique of the social and political effects of Christianity, examines the union of religi ous belief, speculative philosophy and the rational state in Hegel's mature system.

The third volume of philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's LECTURES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION covers Hegel's philosophical interpretation of Christianity. Taken together, the three volumes establish a critical study, separating the material and publishing it as autonomous units on the basis of a complete re-editing of the sources--a series of actual lectures delivered by Hegel in 1821, 1824, 1827, and 1831.

The purpose of this collection of papers is to introduce English speaking philosophers and theologians to something of the variety of the contemporary debate about the religious relevance of Hegel's thought. It is published in the hope that it will appeal not only to specialised students of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion but to a wide audience of scholars interested in Hegel's thought as a whole. The volume grew out of the 1987 Oxford conference on Thought and Faith in the Philosophy of Hegel, but has since developed beyond the confines of the original conference programme. The programme of the conference consisted of five major papers on different aspects of Hegel's religious thought and its reception, followed by a somewhat shorter commentary delivered by another scholar in the same field. This basic format has been retained, but a number of the commentaries have been extended or rewritten and an entirely new piece by Kurt Meist has been commissioned for the purpose of this collection. The volume includes studies of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and the Phenomenology, as well as pieces dealing with the theological relevance of Hegel's philosophy of history and Kierkegaard's attack on Hegel. It con cludes with an examination of the relevance of Hegel's doctrine of absolute Spirit to the modern defence of his philosophy as a whole.

Comparing Averroes’ and Hegel’s positions on the relation between philosophy and religion, this book explores the theme of the authorities of faith and reason, and the origin of truth, in a medieval Islamic and a modern Christian context respectively. Through an in-depth analysis of Averroes’ and Hegel’s parallel views on the nature of philosophical and religious discourse, Belo presents new insights into their perspectives on the relation between philosophical knowledge and religious knowledge, and the differences between philosophy and religion. In addition, Belo explores particular works which have not yet been studied by modern scholarship.