Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed a small but very significant difference between the Spring 1989 Owl and previous issues. The Spring issue was the first to be accomplished completely by desktop publishing instead of typesetting. The “desk” from whose “top” this Owl flew is mine, equipped with an IBM-PC, a modem, two 5 1/4 inch 360 K floppy drives, a 40 megabyte hard drive, a Hewlett Packard LaserJet II printer with a Times Roman soft font, and the newest version of (...) Microsoft began our long experiment with electronic preparation of The Owl about three years ago. Our motive in pursuing this project was to improve our efficiency, not to have a few new toys. During that experiment we made a few mistakes, some of which found their way into The Owl itself. We apologize to all the authors and readers who were affected by them, and especially by the tardiness of recent issues. But we have learned a lot too. Among what we think we have learned is how to avoid repeating our mistakes. The new production system we have developed is not only faster, easier, and cheaper for us editors, but also, we hope, more convenient and more dependable for our authors. At this point, we must count our experiment a success. (shrink)

Kenley Dove’s article [OWL, IX-4] seems to overlook that certain thinker who could probably be the key to the proper elucidation of Hegel’s thought on creativity, i.e. Plotinus. Dove’s threefold breakdown of classical Greek and medieval Christian ideas of creation is cogent, though he fails to include the Neo-Platonic bridge which could not only harmonize for him the “deterministic” metaphysics of the Greeks with the ex nihilo “free-act-of-God” metaphysics of Aquinas, but also provide him with a way to understand that (...) Hegel represents a reconciliation of all of these positions. (shrink)

Robert R. Williams’ summary of my ideas about Hegel’s reading of the first edition of Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre is not wrong, but is a distortion on the side of oversimplification and overstatement. However, I must not condemn too harshly, since I am guilty of a certain measure of these same faults in my original presentation.

Guess the defined words and write them below, one letter per numbered blank. Transfer each letter of these words to the appropriate numbered square in the diagram. The filled-in diagram should contain a quotation reading from left to right. Only black squares, not ends of lines, indicate word endings, The first letters of the guessed words should give, reading vertically, the author of the quotation and the title of the work from which it was taken. Veteran readers of the Saturday (...) Review and the Sunday New York Times should already be familiar with such double-crostic puzzles, which were originally developed by Elizabeth S. Kingsley, Doris Nash Wortman, and Thomas H. Middleton. (shrink)

The first meeting of the Schleiermacher Studies and Translations Group was held August 8–11, 1986, at Drew University. The purposes of this “Schleiermacher Summer Camp” were to plan the translations into English of Schleiermacher’s complete corpus, including sermons and letters, as well as some prominent German secondary sources, and to provide an opportunity for the initial participants in this ambitious project to meet each other and learn each other’s methods. presuppositions, interests, and goals. The sessions were extremely valuable toward these (...) ends, and we all felt the satisfaction of a unified spirit of collaboration. (shrink)

This is a documentary study that presents: background on the debate between Hegel and Schleiermacher that parallels the writing of Hegel's preface to Hinrichs' work; the entire text of Hinrichs' Religion in Its Internal Relationship to Systematic Knowledge; plus appropriate introductions, annotations, a glossary, and a transcription of the German critical edition of Hegel's Hinrichs-Vorwort on which the new translation is based.

One notices immediately that this is a very well organized piece of work, complete with both name and subject indices. The six-page analytic table of contents helpfully distinguishes Angehrn’s various digressions, chiefly into Marxian thought, from the mainstream of his argument. The bibliography is generally an excellent brief sampling of the pertinent Hegelian literature of the last fifteen or twenty years; although, as one might easily expect, since Angehrn earned his doctorate with this work at Heidelberg in 1976, there is (...) perhaps a disproportionate emphasis on the contributions of his dissertation director, Michael Theunissen. (shrink)

One may well argue that there ought not to be any such thing as an “undergraduate-level introduction to Hegel,” simply because, except perhaps for an especially advanced senior major in philosophy or religious studies, no undergraduate should be allowed to read Hegel. Extreme as it is, this view does have some merit. To read Hegel with even the bare minimum of comprehension requires a sophistication in philosophy, history, art history, and general cultural awareness which is seldom found in undergraduates. It (...) is well-known that a first semester freshman with little or no previous knowledge of philosophy is perfectly able, after only a few introductory lectures, to understand in a basic way the most important and complex sections of Plato’s Republic. Similarly, most intelligent freshmen are able to read Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and even Kant, with a tolerable degree of comprehension. But with Hegel, on the other hand, whose thought presupposes, contains, interprets, criticizes, and hebt auf all of the thought which has gone before it, to an extent which no other major philosopher has even attempted, such naive reading is impossible. The problem is compounded by Hegel’s prose style, which, though necessary to his intent, and though passable in German, is too often utterly unfathomable in English, even by experts. Of what use, then, is an undergraduate introduction? (shrink)

This book is a rarity in the currently popular "physics-for-poets" genre insofar as it has a legitimate claim to the interests of metaphysicians and philosophers of science. The author is a veteran scholar who has achieved the unusual combination of professional respectability and commercial success. Although the nonscientific reader may at first be intimidated by the book's clutter of technical jargon, and although readers from all backgrounds may be annoyed by Comfort's compressed style and faddish language, colloquialisms, and mixed metaphors, (...) the text is still quite readable, both since Comfort has provided a useful glossary of technical terms and since his presentation, while difficult in both form and content, is often witty and provocative--and never dull. But one who likes this book could also reasonably be expected to like Finnegan's Wake. (shrink)

Edward Pols is no stranger to these pages; indeed, his three most recent articles in The Review of Metaphysics are all versions of chapters in this, his fourth book. Those of us who have followed his philosophical development closely will recognize that The Acts of our Being elaborates and clarifies--but does not presuppose knowledge of--Meditation on a Prisoner. His general aim with regard to human agency and human action is to show that, yes, things really are as they seem, i.e., (...) that our common sense view that we ourselves originate our actions and are responsible for them, a view which more often than not is found to be contrary to scientific dogma, is in fact the correct view. His general strategy is to blaze a via media between the immediate prejudice which favors prima facie rational agency and the authoritative physiology which pretends to dispense with the concept of "agent." Realizing his task to be a tough one, Pols shrewdly substitutes the term "ontic responsibility," i.e., the state of being of such an ontological nature that accountability is appropriate and seemly, for the old bugaboo of a term "free will," thus perhaps facilitating a serious encounter with his more scientifically inclined readers. While acknowledging that reductionist science has been largely successful in shifting the everyday perception of human nature away from the ancient common sense view toward physicalist explanations and toward a broad faith in the eventual accomplishment of an exhaustive "perfected physiology," he takes great pains to demonstrate that it is not this newly popular scientific view, but the prima facie view, which is the philosophical ground of the entire legal structure, and hence, by extension, of social organization and civilization in general. Addressing the intelligent layperson rather than his professional colleague, Pols claims fundamentally that science's current project is to prove to us that we are actually something other than what we seem to ourselves to be. But science ought, instead of cancelling our prima facie knowledge of ourselves, to contribute to a fuller understanding of this prima facie knowledge. (shrink)

In a wise and forceful reaction against his training in analytic philosophy, Vaught fervently seeks a genuinely human wholeness in life. But while this wholeness at once involves and integrates our origins, our goals, our existential contingency, our social roles, and our orientation in the cosmos and with respect to God, still: "Wholeness is not to be equated with completeness, and fragmentation is not a problem that can be dealt with at the exclusively reflective level". Such a Kierkegaardian denial of (...) the efficacy of speculation in what is essentially a religious facet of the individual naturally brings Vaught into conflict with Hegel, and Vaught does not evade this challenge. The consideration of Hegel is the last of the four "images" which constitute the book, the first three being Melville's Moby Dick, the Bible's Hebrew patriarchs, and Plato's Euthyphro. Each "image" is designed to occupy a middle ground between systematic philosophy and direct experience--and indeed to be just a "story"--so that the "storyteller" Vaught may present each as a "version," rather than as an abstract or a part, of the whole. (shrink)