As the title indicates, Faith and Knowledge deals with the relation between religious faith and cognitive beliefs, between the truth of religion and the truths of philosophy and science. Hegel is guided by his understanding of the historical situation: the individual alienated from God, nature, and community; and he is influenced by the new philosophy of Schelling, the Spinozistic Philosophy of Identity with its superb vision of the inner unity of God, nature, and rational man. Through a brilliant discussion of (...) the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, and other luminaries of the period, Hegel shows that the time has finally come to give philosophy the authentic shape it has always been trying to reach, a shape in which philosophy’s old conflicts with religion on the one hand and with the sciences on the other are suspended once for all. This is the first English translation of this important essay. Professor H. S. Harris offers a historical and analytic commentary to the text and Professor Cerf offers an introduction to the general reader which focuses on the concept of intellectual intuition and on the difference between authentic and inauthentic philosophy. (shrink)

For me personally the year 1945 is significant because it marked the beginning of my own academic career. In that year I matriculated at Oxford as a candidate for the B.A. in Literae Humaniores. For Hegel studies it is significant for a different reason. It is the year in which Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies appeared. Popper’s book contributed nothing to the understanding of Hegel - M. B. Foster’s Political Philosophy of Plato and Hegel, which appeared ten years earlier, (...) is much more important in that respect - but it sealed in amber, so to speak, the image of Hegel which had become canonical for the liberal generation whose public conscience was Bertrand Russell. It marked the nadir of Hegel’s reputation in the Anglo-Saxon world.. (shrink)

I began my review of volume 6 of the new critical edition by saying that from the three volumes published we could see how the editors planned to deal with almost all the problems that they faced. I shall not be tempted into any rash statement of this kind again; for it is clear that every volume brings its own special problems with it. The present volume contains the manuscript that Hegel wrote for a course on “Realphilosophie” which he probably (...) gave for the first time at Jena in the Winter Semester of 1805/6, and again in Summer 1806. This manuscript was first utilized by K. Michelet, who inserted copious quotations from the “Naturphilosophie” into the Zusätze for his edition of the Encyclopedia “Philosophy of Nature”. Michelet already knew fairly accurately what the provenance and date of the manuscript were. Modern studies have only made the dating a little more precise and altogether more secure. The whole manuscript was finally published by J. Hoffmeister in 1931. It has been known to us for the last forty-five years as Jenenser Realphilosophie II. (shrink)

The beginnings of Hegel’s interest in “logic” as a branch of philosophy are somewhat obscure. In a lecture of 1830 Schelling claimed that Hegel first began to attend to the subject only because “his friends at the University” suggested that it was a good topic for his lectures because it was being neglected. Schelling’s object by then was evidently to suggest that Hegel’s “logic” had always been a superficial pretense. But Hegel was alive to contradict him. So I think his (...) statement of the facts must be right as far as it goes. I do not therefore believe that Hegel came to Jena with any “logical” manuscripts. In my view, it was Schelling himself—especially in his System of Transcendental Idealism —who sparked Hegel’s interest in the subject. (shrink)

I have spent more than thirty years struggling with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; and I am absolutely weary of wrestling with the angel I found in it. So when I was pressed to contribute to the silver anniversary issue of The Owl I decided to take the easy way, and to send in an essay on the Phenomenology and the Logic that is literally the last word from the two-volume commentary that will be published as Hegel’s Ladder. Far from being (...) complete the “Hegel Renaissance” is still only in its adolescence. But my part in it is now over. Laus Deo. (shrink)

To respond to Jay Bernstein and Terry Pinkard is both easy and difficult. It is easy because of the fundamental agreement between us about the general interpretation of Hegel as a post-Kantian philosopher; and it is difficult because there are no misunderstandings to complain of and to be clarified. I must begin by thanking them both for giving all my potential readers such careful, accurate, and insightful bird's-eye views of my "literal commentary." As Terry says, "it sometimes becomes difficult to (...) discern the overall argument Harris is making," but these two readers have certainly not "lost their way.". (shrink)

This fairly massive volume, clearly written and admirably printed and presented, deals with just one major crisis in the development of Hegel’s thought. It begins with the two-year collaboration of Schelling and Hegel at Jena from the spring of 1801 till the spring of 1803; and it terminates with the text book that Hegel abandoned unfinished in the spring of 1805. In two important respects it does not adequately cover “Hegel’s itinerary at Jena”. First, it does not deal with the (...) second crisis - the one that caused Hegel to abandon his textbook unfinished, and begin working on the Phenomenology, while recasting the presentation of his “real philosophy” in the logical mould which he essentially retained after the end of 1805,. Secondly, it does not deal with the evolution of Hegel’s philosophy of nature at all. The author is interested exclusively in the interrelation and interaction between Hegel’s conception of logic and philosophic method and his social philosophy. (shrink)

This handsome volume contains Fichte’s preparatory, supplementary, and popular writings about the first version of the Wissenschaftslehre, together with a very judicious selection from his philosophical correspondence in the decade 1790-99. Anyone who puts it on the shelf beside the Heath-Lachs translation of the 1794 lecture script and the two 1797 “Introductions” can now be confident of possessing in excellent and accurate English all of Fichte’s theoretical discussions of the philosophical view that made him both famous and immensely influential in (...) the development of German idealism. His later thought remains still the private preserve of a few German-reading specialists; and we need good modern translations of his practical philosophy: Foundation of Natural Right and System of Ethical Theory. But his Theory of Scientific Knowledge we do now have. (shrink)

The dialogue Bruno, which Schelling published in 1802, has always been recognized as one of the minor masterpieces of German Romantic literature. It cannot be ranked with Hölderlin’s Hyperion or with the Heinrich von Ofterdingen of Novalis; but it is one of the relatively few works by a major German philosopher that deserves the serious attention of general readers of European literature. Unlike Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, Schelling could write about the most abstruse philosophical issues in a way that was (...) intelligible and interesting to the cultured general audience of the time. In this respect he is the only German before Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who can be compared with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume — though it is only with the Berkeley of Alciphron and Siris that his thought has any affinities! (shrink)

F. H. Bradley’s work was for a long time neglected by English speaking philosophers. He had virtually ceased to have any readers by the time of his death in 1924. But in the last few years there has been a small resurgence of interest in his work. Richard Wollheim produced a significant monograph for the Penguin Philosophers series in 1959; and Barnes and Noble published Anthony Manser’s sympathetic study of Bradley’s logic in 1983. But MacNiven has now returned to his (...) first book, Ethical Studies, and in so doing has enabled us to put the later metaphysical and logical work in what I believe is the right perspective. (shrink)

In about 1950, the Fondazione Gentile in Rome began the publication of a new complete edition of his works. This edition is still in progress; but except for his political polemics and the promised nine volumes of the “fragments” it is now virtually complete. Forty-one of the first forty-two volumes have now been published. All of Gentile’s works on philosophy and the history of philosophy have been available for years. Two volumes of his essays on educational theory and reform have (...) appeared recently and just one is still to come. (shrink)

In the far-off days before the first World War, the British journal Mind was full of articles by writers who thought of themselves as “Neoidealists”. So when the enfant terrible of the groves of Academic Oxford in that generation—a “pragmatic Humanist” by the name of Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller—played his most notorious practical joke upon his colleagues by publishing a mock-issue of the journal he offered as a frontispiece “A portrait of the Absolute in the pink of condition”. Beneath a (...) pale-pink semi-transparent tissue one found a printed frame that embraced a perfectly blank white sheet of paper. (shrink)

This newest volume in the always excellent “Universale Laterza” series of texts and studies in the history of philosophy is well worthy of its place. Antimo Negri has set out to survey the influence of Hegel in the philosophy of this century. He cleaves firmly to his assigned chronological limits; and he deals with the philosophical currents of Germany, Britain, France and Italy. Both the Hegelian and the anti-Hegelian tendencies of philosophy in North America are treated as tangential to the (...) British tradition; and, Ortega y Gasset is given a place in the section on “German historicism.” Hegel’s influence in Scandinavia and the East is not discussed; but the range of Negri’s direct acquaintance with the philosophical literature of Western Europe is truly remarkable. (shrink)

The essay published here in English was one of the earliest documents of the birth of the form of idealism which Giovanni Gentile called “Actual Idealism.” The most celebrated full-length statement of it was published in 1916 as General Theory of the Spirit as Pure Act. But there is no other essay in which the relation between Gentile’s view and the great German tradition from which it derives is made so plain.

This slim volume provides a bird’s eye view, in admirably clear Italian, of the philosophy, scientific and humane, of Errol Harris. It seems probable that Rinaldi’s attention was drawn to Harris when he found that the criticism of Husserl in his own Critica della gnoseologia fenomenologica had been largely anticipated in Harris’s articles of 1976 and 1977 in the Review of Metaphysics and Idealistic Studies. He has certainly studied the Harris corpus carefully and thoroughly—from the article on “The Philosophy of (...) Nature in Hegel’s System” down to the Idealistic Studies article. He speaks of the Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel as “presently in course of completion.” My own acquaintance with Harris’s works is less encyclopaedic, but I was sorry not to find any reference to Revelation Through Reason which is one of my own favorites. That, however, is the only missed bet that I can find. (shrink)

_In this essay, Hegel attempted to show how Fichte’s Science of Knowledge was an advance from the position of Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, and how Schelling had made a further advance from the position of Fichte._.