The antagonism between G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher during their thirteen years of association as colleagues at the University in Berlin has been well documented in recent Hegel scholarship. What is left unexplained by this scholarship is the sudden onset of Schleiermacher’s animosity toward Hegel upon the latter’s arrival in Berlin. Although there had been differences of opinion between these two figures from their earliest publications—Hegel had already criticized Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion in 1802 in Faith and Knowledge (...) —there was no evidence of rancor until Hegel joined the faculty at Berlin. In fact, it was Schleiermacher, as Rector of the University, who was principally responsible for securing the position for Hegel in the first place. (shrink)

An argument is presented for a form of democracy in which both identity groups and secondary associations might receive some political recognition. The aim of this approach is to ward against both the atomism of mass democracy and the divisiveness of highly politicized and insular identity groups on the other. This approach relies on achieving social integration, not by increasing unity or homogenization, but by increasing the complexity of group membership. This approach differs from both the “politics of difference” which (...) seeks recognition for identity groups and from “associational democracy” approaches which seeks recognition for the voluntary associations of civil society. (shrink)

While Friedrich Schleiermacher‘s thought has been of overwhelming importance for theology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his influence as a philosopher is much more circumscribed and as a social and political thinker it is almost nil.

While Friedrich Schleiermacher‘s thought has been of overwhelming importance for theology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his influence as a philosopher is much more circumscribed and as a social and political thinker it is almost nil.

Among the general features of modern Western discourse is a marked emphasis on the individual self. The nearly total displacement of the linguistic practice of referring to individuals as 'souls' when speaking philosophically, by the use of the terms 'selves' or 'subjects', is one sign of the modern proclivity for acknowledging the self-conscious and reflexive aspects of human experience. However, the conceptions of self and subject that have been inherited in the past few hundred years of Western philosophical thought have (...) been increasingly called into question. One source of this recent reevaluation of our modern conceptions of the self is associated with post-structuralist critiques, now several decades old, of .. (shrink)