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1. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1/2
Andrew Komasinski History and Philosophical Method: Hegel, Stewart, and Chinese Religion
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Here, I consider three issues in Jon Stewart’s Hegel’s Interpretation of the Religions of the World chapter on Hegel’s treatment of Chinese religions in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. First, I show how Stewart’s compilation of multiple courses into one unified entity hides the substantial promotion of its status in the 1831 lectures. Second, I contend that rather than identifying Hegel’s Chinese religion with the ancient Zhou practices as Stewart does, Hegel sees it as referring to state Ruism up to and including Hegel’s time. Finally, I posit that the main challenge is distinguishing Hegel’s method of philosophical history from other forms of history and the consequences this has for evaluating the determinate religions. In the process, I argue for a broad dialectical interpretation over one committed to each step in Hegel’s treatment of these religions.
2. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1/2
Jon Stewart Hegel’s Account of the Chinese Religion: Interpretative Challenges
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This article responds to Andrew Komasinski’s “History and Philosophical Method: Hegel, Stewart, and Chinese Religion,” which provides a valuable discussion of my book, Hegel’s Interpretation of the Religions of the World. Specifically, he discusses my chapter on Hegel’s treatment of the Chinese religion (in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion) and also offers some important reflections on methodology. I argue that, although the conceptual understanding of religion is essential for Hegel, the historical aspect of his approach cannot be dismissed. Moreover, I agree that Hegel’s account of the Chinese religion is diverse and changes during the various iterations of his lectures and that much work remains to be done on this important topic in Hegel studies.
3. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1/2
John Karas The Wasteland and the Ancient City: Historical Materials and the Interpretation of Hegel’s Logic
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Although it is a common trope that Hegel’s philosophy marks a seminal shift in the historical orientation of philosophical thought in general, some of the historical problems confronting the reader of the Science of Logic remain relatively neglected. This is not to say that there is any lack of historical work on various dimensions of the Logic. Rather, what remains neglected are the hidden difficulties involved in construing how historical materials contribute to the logical project developed in Hegel’s Science of Logic. These difficulties play an important role in determining the heterogeneous significance of these historical materials, because the role they play in the logical developments is markedly different in different portions of the text being examined. This essay (1) demonstrates that a reader must keep in mind this lack of uniformity when developing a critical interpretation of the Logic, and (2) develops guidelines to facilitate this approach.
4. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1/2
Jeffrey Reid Hegel's Dialectics of Digestion, Excretion, and Animal Subjectivity
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In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel describes at length and in detail the particular workings of animal digestion and excretion, referring to the empirical research of his day (Berzelius, Spallanzani, Traviranus). By becoming engaged in the scientific disputes and insights of the time—regarding, for example, the mechanical versus chemical nature of digestion, immediate digestive assimilation and the chemical composition of feces—Hegel arrives at the novel idea that what the animal excretes as superfluous is its own particular entanglement with inorganic otherness. The animal’s subsequent feeling of triumph and satisfaction constitutes the affirmation of individual purposiveness, a form of immediate ideality that Hegel presents as animal subjectivity.
book reviews
5. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1/2
Paolo Diego Bubbio Félix Duque. Remnants of Hegel: Remains of Ontology, Religion, and Community
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6. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1/2
Allegra de de Laurentiis Arash Abazari. Hegel’s Ontology of Power. The Structure of Social Domination in Capitalism
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7. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1/2
Ekin Erkan Angelica Nuzzo. Approaching Hegel’s Logic, Obliquely: Melville, Moliere, Beckett
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8. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1/2
Ryan Froese Nahum Brown. Hegel on Possibility: Dialectics, Contradiction, and Modality
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9. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1/2
L. J. Johnston Jean-François Kervégan. The Actual and the Rational: Hegel and Objective Spirit
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10. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1/2
William Desmond In Memoriam: Lawrence Stanley Stepelevich, July 22, 1930–August 14, 2022
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11. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1/2
Jere Surber We Remember William "Bill" Maker (1949–2021)
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12. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1/2
New Books
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13. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1/2
Recent Dissertations
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14. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1/2
List of Abbreviations
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15. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1/2
Peter C. Hodgson Hegel’s Interpretation of Determinate Religion: Analysis of the Scholarship Issues
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This is the first major study of Hegel’s treatment of the world religious in many years. It has much to commend it. The author possesses a mastery of the sources used by Hegel; he shows the pivotal position of “Determinate Religion” in Hegel’s philosophy of religion; he discusses the rise of Orientalism in the nineteenth century; and he demonstrates the connection between “the logic of the gods,” human self-recognition, and the slow progression of freedom in culture and history. My primary criticism is that Stewart does not utilize the resources provided by the critical edition of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion prepared by W. Jaeschke in the 1980s (even though he provides references to the Jaeschke edition). Stewart is interested in the composite picture rather than in how Hegel arranges, modifies, and experiments with the materials available to him in each of his four series of lectures. His picture is essentially the one provided by the old edition of 1840 and for this reason leaves much to be desired.
16. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1/2
Allen Speight The Sphinx and the Veil of Isis: Enigmas of Interpretation in Hegel’s Determinate Religion and Its Relation to Hegel’s History of Art
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Jon Stewart’s recent book offers an opportunity to re-explore one of the richest areas of Hegel’s cultural research during the Berlin period, the wide-ranging study of world religions developed in the second part of his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. While this treatment of world religious traditions has often been taken as out-of-date and narrowly Eurocentric, there are, as Stewart suggests, important contributions within Hegel’s developing work on pre-classical and Asian religions that remain of interest to contemporary philosophers of religion, art and history. This paper (1) compares the changes Hegel makes in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion to those in the Aesthetics lectures belonging to the same period; and (2) examines in particular how Hegel’s view of the relation between Athens and Jerusalem changed with developing knowledge of Egyptian and other near Eastern cultures.
17. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1/2
Dale M. Schlitt Hegel on Determinate Religion: Claims, Challenges, Conclusions
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With his important, history-contextualizing study, Jon Stewart has drawn renewed attention to Hegel’s often neglected philosophical interpretation of determinate religion. He focuses on Hegel’s philosophical reading of distinct historical religions, in which Hegel brings them together in serial fashion. In so doing, Hegel proposes a unique philosophy of determinate religion which constitutes an essential element in his philosophical argument in favor of the consummate religion, historically instantiated in Christianity. Stewart’s study is, in effect, an invitation to look again at Hegel’s monumental effort to comprehend religion in its varied historical realizations. The present article proposes to respond to this invitation in a preliminary and modest way. We note various claims Hegel makes regarding his philosophy of determinate religion and then identify a number of challenges arising from these claims. Against this background of claims and challenges, we conclude with an appreciation of Stewart’s work. The appreciation proceeds in four steps: first, a recall of what Stewart intends to do, the focus he adopts, and the theses he argues; second, a review of his emphasis on Hegel’s contexts and sources; third, several remarks on his reading of Hegel on determinate religion; fourth, a reflection on important contributions Stewart makes to the present and future study of Hegel on determinate religion.
18. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1/2
Francis X. Clooney, SJ Much Ado about Nothing?: Encounter with Bhagavad Gītā 6.25
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This essay carefully examines the debate between Hegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt about the meaning of the Bhagavad Gîtâ, and more specifically about several verses in Gîtâ 6 regarding the radical emptying and purification of the mind. My aim is to propose a new and wider conversation, not possible in Hegel’s time but necessary in ours, between European scholars and peer Indian intellectuals in traditions familiar with the Gîtâ for centuries before any European knew of it at all. To exemplify this new work, I attend to the reading of the same Gîtâ 6 passage by the famed philosopher and theologian Madhusûdana Sarasvatî (ca. 1540–1640). In this way, the European inquiry into the status of Indian thought and religion ceases to be an exclusively European endeavor, becoming instead a beneficial and mutually corrective crosscultural and interreligious conversation about texts and history, philosophy and theology.
19. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1/2
Philip T. Grier On Divine Transcendence and Non-Transcendence
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The governing theme in Hegel’s account of the history of religions is the gradual emergence and separation of spirit from nature, culminating in the “infinite” transcendence of spirit over nature. Within the story of spirit itself, however, a more subtle and complex problem arises: the possible transcendence of infinite over finite spirit, of divine over human nature. Hegel firmly insisted that divine and human nature are one, a unity, thereby apparently ruling out the possibility of a transcendence of one over the other. And yet, it is not easy to dismiss the notion that infinite (divine) spirit must nevertheless in some respects transcend finite (human) spirit. The remainder of the essay attempts to tease apart several aspects of this problem, exploring possible senses of ‘transcendence’ (of infinite over finite spirit) that might be maintained, without violating Hegel’s central and profound theological claim.
20. The Owl of Minerva: Volume > 52 > Issue: 1/2
Curtis L. Thompson God, World, and Freedom: Towards a Hegelian Pantransentheism
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The second volume of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion emphasizes the pulsating particularities that distinguish the religions of history from one another. This volume discloses Hegel’s philosophical theology to be an open system whose concepts, as Jon Stewart points out, are no mere abstractions but principles concretely instantiated in the real world. This article first reviews key analytical notions used in investigating religions, with the notion of freedom being the most important. Next are examined two models of the God-world relation that have gained significant attention in the secondary literature on Hegel: pantheism, which affirms God as the substantial power in all things, and panentheism, which affirms all things as being in God. The essay’s final portion turns to a third model of the God-world relation, pantransentheism, which affirms that all things are being transformed in God. There I offer a very abbreviated gesture towards a Hegelian pantransentheism.