Hegel: Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God

by Hodgson, Peter C.

• ISBN13: 9780199694693
• ISBN10: 0199694699
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-12-17
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Hegel Lectures Series Series Editor: Peter C. Hodgson Hegel's lectures have had as great a historical impact as the works he himself published. Important elements of his system are elaborated only in the lectures, especially those given in Berlin during the last decade of his life. The original editors conflated materials from different sources and dates, obscuring the development and logic of Hegel's thought. The Hegel Lectures series is based on a selection of extant and recently discovered transcripts and manuscripts. The original lecture series are reconstructed so that the structure of Hegel's argument can be followed. Each volume presents an accurate new translation accompanied by an editorial introduction and annotations on the text, which make possible the identification of Hegel's many allusions and sources. Hegel'sLectures on the Philosophy of Religionrepresent the final and in some ways the decisive element of his entire philosophical system. His conception and execution of the lectures differed significantly on each of the occasions he delivered them, in 1821, 1824, 1827, and 1831. The older editions introduced insoluble problems by conflating these materials into an editorially constructed text. The present volumes establish a critical edition by separating the series of lectures and presenting them as independent units on the basis of a complete re-editing of the sources by Walter Jaeschke. The English translation has been prepared by a team consisting of Robert F. Brown, Peter C. Hodgson, and J. Michael Stewart, with the assistance of H. S. Harris. Now widely recognized as the definitive English edition, it is being reissued by Oxford in the Hegel Lectures Series. The three volumes include editorial introductions, critical annotations on the text, textual variants, and tables, bibliography, and glossary. "Determinate Religion" comprises Hegel's treatment of world religions, starting with indigeneous or nature religions, moving on to religions of the Far East (Hinduism, Buddhism, Lamaism), the Near East (Persian, Egyptian, and Jewish religions), and the West (Greek and Roman religions). What Hegel succeeded in offering is not so much a history as a geography of religions, as demonstrated by the different schematic structures adopted in successive years.

Table of Contents

Editorial Introduction	p. 1
Lectures on The Proofs of the Existence of God (1829)	p. 35
First Lecture	p. 37
The Occasion for These Lectures
Discrediting of the Proofs in Modern Culture
Faith and Reason
The Elevation of the Human Spirit to God
Second Lecture	p. 45
Subjective Proof and Finite Knowledge
The Turn to Faith
Third Lecture	p. 52
Faith, Immediacy, and Mediation
Transition to Feeling
Fourth Lecture	p. 57
Feeling
Fifth Lecture	p. 63
Summary of the Preceding Argument
Can God Be Known?
Sixth Lecture	p. 69
An Affirmative Approach
The Historical Aspect
The Proof from Consensus
The Metaphysical Proof
Seventh Lecture	p. 75
Critique of the Metaphysics of Natural Theology
The Speculative Concept
Eighth Lecture	p. 82
The Multiplicity of Proofs and the One God
Ninth Lecture	p. 88
Two Kinds of Proof
Modes of Connection between Being and Concept
The Three Proofs
Tenth Lecture	p. 93
The Cosmological Proof
The Categories of Contingency and Necessity
Eleventh Lecture	p. 101
The Argument from Contingency to Necessity
The Proofs and Logic
The Nature of Necessity
Twelfth Lecture	p. 107
Critique of Absolute Necessity
Thirteenth Lecture	p. 111
The Defect in the Argument from Contingency to Necessity
No Passage from the Finite to the Infinite?
Fourteenth Lecture	p. 119
The Finitude of Spirit
The Infinitude of Spirit
The Community of God and Humanity with Each Other
Fifteenth Lecture	p. 127
The Speculative View of the Transition from Finite to Infinite
Sixteenth Lecture	p. 133
Religions of Absolute Necessity
The Pantheism of Absolute Necessity
Characteristics of Systems of Substantiality
On the Cosmological OProof	p. 147
A Fragment
The Teleological Proof	p. 169
From the 1831 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
The Ontological Proof	p. 187
From the 1831 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
Glossary	p. 195
Bibliography	p. 201
Index	p. 207
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