In Prajñā and Reason Nishitani presents a powerful vision of philosophy as Absolute knowing. Nishitani’s conclusions are striking: Absolute knowing can only fulill its potential by beginning without any presuppositions and affirming the truth of contradiction. Because Hegel’s philosophy also purports to be a science of Absolute knowing, in Prajñā and Reason Nishitani develops his own account of the Absolute in conversation with Hegel’s philosophy. We reconstruct Nishitani’s reading and various critiques of Hegel, and thereafter evaluate its merits. Our inquiry (...) shows that Hegel too begins without presuppositions and affirms the truth of contradiction. As a result, we argue that Nishitani’s profound reflections on Absolute knowing draw him into close proximity with Hegel’s thinking and call us to re-think the very being of philosophy and philosophical practice today. (shrink)

The Cambridge Platonists are modern thinkers and the context of seventeenth-century Cambridge science is an inalienable and decisive part of their thought. Cudworth’s interest in ancient theology, however, seems to conflict with the progressive aspect of his philosophy. The problem of the nature, however, of this ‘Platonism’ is unavoidable. Even in his complex and recondite ancient theology Cudworth is motivated by philosophical considerations, and his legacy among philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries should not be overlooked. In particular we (...) will draw on the scholarship of the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann in order to reassess the significance of Cudworth’s theory of religion for later philosophical developments. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to investigate Hegel's reception of Jakob Böhme during the Jena period. In section 1, the Author analyses Fragment 46 and Fragment 49 of The Jena Wastebook, in which Hegel outlines a God's life-course inspired by Böhmian motives. For Hegel, the Böhmian theory of the wrath of God and fall of Lucifer expresses the opposition and reconciliation between nature and spirit. The relational model here developed is that of an external negativity, which annihilates nature's being-for-itself. (...) In section 2, the Author shows Hegel's use of the same relational model in The Jena Logic and Metaphysics, assuming a Kantian and Böhmian terminology. The part on the Highest Essence explains the opposition between the good and evil principles and their necessary unity. The introjection of the evil principle into the good principle is exactly what leads Hegel to investigate philosophically the myth of the fall. In sections 3 and 4, the emphasis is on the connection of this myth with the ideas of the wrath of God and fall of Lucifer: The Jena Logic and Metaphysics and The Phenomenology of Spirit consider Böhme's thought as a prefiguration of that self-relational negativity which discloses the development of the thing itself. (shrink)

A significant but easily overlooked metaphilosophical theme in Schopenhauer’s corpus concerns the relationship between religion, philosophy, and “man’s need for metaphysics”. I discuss the importance of this theme, and its attendant methodological commitments, for how we should understand Schopenhauer’s unique approach to global religious and mystical traditions. I demonstrate that explication of this theme provides a coherent, cogent way to identify and evaluate the substantive reasons, often unstated and which may otherwise appear to lack coherence or cogency, that underlie Schopenhauer’s (...) criticism of philosophers associated with the tradition of German Idealism. (shrink)