The Owl of Minerva

Volume 52, Issue 1/2, 2021

Book Discussion: "Hegel's Interpretation of the Religions of the World"

Allen Speight
Pages 11-26

The Sphinx and the Veil of Isis
Enigmas of Interpretation in Hegel’s Determinate Religion and Its Relation to Hegel’s History of Art

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 While this treatment of world religious traditions has often been taken as out-of-date and narrowly Eurocentric, there are, as Stewart suggests, important contributions within Hegel’s developing work on pre-classical and Asian religions that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.