Thought And Faith In The Philosophy Of Hegel

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.

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.

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.

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.

A new translation directly from the original manuscript of Hegel's "Faith and knowledge or the reflective philosophy of subjectivity in the completeness of its forms as Kantian, Jacobian and Fichtean philosophy". The original title in German is "Glauben und Wissen oder die Reflexionsphilosophie der Subjektivität in der Vollständigkeit ihrer Formen als Kantische, Jacobische und Fichtesche Philosophie". This edition contains an extensive afterword on Hegelian philosophy by the translator and a timeline of his life and works. This essay was first published in the "Kritisches Journal der Philosophie," which was edited by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. It appeared in the 2nd volume, 1st installment of the journal in Tübingen, published by Cotta in 1802. In it, Hegel discusses how various philosophers like Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte have dealt with the concept of the Absolute, indicating that it is beyond reason's grasp. Hementions the limitations of reason in understanding the Absolute and how philosophers have turned to faith when faced with the unknowable. Hegel suggests that the idea that reason is subordinate to faith, as expressed in older times, and against which philosophy vehemently asserted its absolute autonomy, has disappeared. Reason has asserted itself within positive religion, and there is now a sense that the conflict between philosophy and the positive aspects of religion, such as miracles, is considered obsolete and obscure.

This book addresses one of the most ancestral themes of philosophy which is equally one of the questions most profoundly rooted in man, the question of God and of his existence. And since this question concerns both philosophy and religion, it is immediately accompanied by another question regarding the relationship between faith and reason: what can philosophical reason tell us about the existence of God? To what extent is it capable of providing knowledge of God and his nature? What use of reason is at stake here? More fundamentally still, must reason recognize its limit and create room for faith (and what kind of faith is it, then—rational or irrational)? or can it, on the contrary, claim to be able to reach an adequate knowledge of God, a knowledge capable of fully assuming its absoluteness? To address these essential questions, Benjamin Ezulike focuses on two giants of philosophical thought, Kant and Hegel....Whoever reads the present work will find a clear, rigorous and, above all, strictly honest presentation of the way in which Kant and Hegel, in their respective thoughts, conceived and interpreted the question of God and his existence, a question that no philosophy worthy of the name can afford to ignore without failing to meet the radicalism that is emblematic of the philosophical enterprise. Gilbert Gérard, Professor Emeritus, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium.

“God became man that man might become God”. This thought, expressed in terms of a sharing of natures, human and divine, is to be found in the most ancient Christian liturgies and still in use, at the Offertory typically. This book shows how Hegel fleshes this thought out, shorn though of picture-language, in conscious or less-than-conscious continuity with this Biblical belief in “the power to become the sons of God”. This involves some stripping away of the false fleshliness cast over Hegel’s “philosophy of spirit” by interpreters ignorant of and hence unable to see this element in him, wishing, quite hopelessly, rather to adapt his work to a current materialist vision of development. The book is, thus, in the line of Thomas Aquinas and, obliquely, McTaggart and other “idealist” thinkers immediately prior to the rediscoveries of this strand and more in Hegel by today’s theologians and others, such as Charles Taylor in our English-speaking world, who, nonetheless, regrettably, mostly fail to “go the whole hog”. They cannot believe that Hegel’s thought corresponds, in development as charted by, say, Newman, to the original Patristic line. Nonetheless, in these respects, at least, it does, as is brought out here.