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Displaying: 1-15 of 15 documents


1. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
Ardis B. Collins Dedicated to the Memory of Robert R. Williams, Who Passed from This Life on March 10, 2018
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book discussion: hegel on the proofs and the personhood of god, by robert r. williams
2. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
Ardis B. Collins List of Abbreviations for the Discussion of Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God, by Robert R. Williams
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3. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
Philip T. Grier Robert R. Williams's Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God: Synopsis
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4. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
Peter C. Hodgson Hegel on the Proofs, Personhood, and Freedom of God
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The paper expresses appreciation for Williams's fine study, which restores Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of religion and on the proofs of the existence of God to a central place in his system, and rejects the anti-metaphysical reading of Hegel that is regnant today. The paper attempts to show how the proofs are co-constitutive and self-supporting. It demonstrates the importance to Hegel of both the concrete historical "this" and the community of faith. It ends with reflections on Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of world history, which offer an interpretation as to how God is efficaciously present in history without violating the fabric of history.
5. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
Stephen Houlgate Hegel on the Personhood of God
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In this essay, I examine Robert Williams’s account of Hegel’s concept of divine “personhood.” I endorse Williams’s claims that God, for Hegel, is not a person but exhibits only personhood, and that divine personhood realises itself in a human community based on mutual recognition. I take issue, however, with Williams’s further claim that Hegel also takes God and humanity to stand in a relation of mutual recognition to one another, since this claim, in my view, risks turning God into a person after all. To conclude, I briefly consider a difference between Williams and myself concerning the relation of right to mutual recognition.
6. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
Philip T. Grier Reading Religion into the Logic
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Robert R. Williams’s last book, Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God (Oxford University Press, 2017) undertakes to reconnect with and revive the largely forgotten “centrist” interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy from the early 1840s, associated especially with the work of Karl Michelet. An immediate consequence of this move is to direct renewed attention to the connection between Hegel’s Logic and his philosophy of religion. Taking this connection seriously appears to entail a re-interpretation of the absolute idea, adding an explicit level of theological significance to it in retrospect which would not appear to be required when the Logic is read on its own. And yet the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion unambiguously seem to require such a re-reading of the Logic. Such a development may appear to raise questions about the possibility of a “presuppositionless” reading of the Logic, along with questions about how the truth claims of the Realphilosophie can be justified. A possible resolution of such questions could be found if one takes seriously George di Giovanni’s suggestion that the Logic must be regarded both as the first element of Hegel’s system, and also the final one. The appropriateness of such a second reading appears to be strongly supported by Errol Harris’s interpretation of the Logic. The additional layers of meaning, the theological interpretation, can be read into the Logic as the final element of the system, without affecting a “presuppositionless” reading of it as the first element.
7. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
Simon Lumsden The Satisfaction of Absolute Spirit
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Robert R. Williams, in Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God, offers an important examination of the notion of absolute spirit, a central but under-examined notion in Hegel’s thought. Williams argues that absolute spirit, along with Hegel’s other core notions such as the concept and the absolute idea, is best conceived as an organic whole. This approach, he claims, best captures the self-determination and dynamism of the whole. What absolute spirit seeks to describe is how spirit can both produce itself and legitimate itself. I argue that the model of the organism, and any onto-theological claim for absolute spirit, misses the post-critical aspiration of this notion.
8. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
Cyril O'Regan Robert Williams’s Hegelian God
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This essay focuses on the way Williams elaborates, defends, and recommends Hegel’s revision of Christianity, which makes possible a Christianity free from the defects of its pre-modern form without collapsing into atheism and humanism. The essay begins by examining the development of Williams’s case in Hegel on the Proofs and Personhood of God and in Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God. This examination shows that (1) Williams uses Hegel’s critique of pre-modern Christianity to demonstrate that modernity, in which discourse, practices, and forms of life are regulated by freedom and reason, means the end of orthodox theology, and (2) uses Hegel’s logic of relations and reciprocal determination to interpret the God-world relation and the internal constitution of the divinity so that it preserves divine transcendence and independence. The second section of the essay challenges Williams’s position by showing (1) how reciprocal determination does not just revise and qualify the asymmetrical dependence that is the lynchpin of classical theism, it completely disqualifies it, (2) how the analysis of the Trinity involves the divinity in a complete emptying of itself into the world and its being as the world, (3) so that Williams’s God cannot preserve even a hair’s breadth of the transcendence required for qualifying as a form of Christianity. The essay concludes from this that Williams’s appropriation of Hegel’s revised Christianity is infected with an element that destabilizes its ability to mediate between pre-modern insistence on God’s transcendence and independence and modernity’s insistence on human freedom and the universal status of its rational subjectivity, with a decisive leaning towards the humanistic posture.
remembering bob williams
9. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
Philip T. Grier Remembering Bob Williams
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10. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
Stephen Houlgate Memories of Bob
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11. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
Giacomo Rinaldi Remembering the Hegelian Philosopher Robert R. Williams
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12. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
George di Giovanni One More Note on the Translation of Hegel's Science of Logic
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13. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
New Books
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14. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
Recent Dissertations
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15. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 49 > Issue: 1/2
HSA 25th Biennial Conference: Hegel, Tragedy, and Comedy
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