Hegel's Philosophy of Religion

(4 Credits)

This seminar will be devoted to an integral reading and discussion of German Idealism's most robust articulation of a resolutely modern and historicized, if also deeply philosophical and systematic, dialectical and speculative theology. Building upon Hegel's mature exposition of his philosophical system and his conception of Absolute Knowing, in his published works--that is, the Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and Elements of the Philosophy of Right--we will study the earliest origins and ultimate presentation in lecture form of his discursive transformation of Biblical, scholastic, dogmatic, pietist, and mystical notions of the divine. We will further investigate Hegel's reformulated proofs for the existence of God as well as his rejection of a host of contemporary Romantic ideas of the Absolute. Special attention will finally be paid to Hegel's alternative for the Spinozistic views that were either advocated or rejected during the so-called Atheismusstreit and to the more radical forms of historical and materialist critique of religion as such and in toto that emerged among revolutionary representatives of the Left-Hegelian generation that immediately followed his death.