This essay reflects on Newman’s famous analyses of natural and revealed religion and their relation in the tenth and final chapter of the Grammar of Assent. There are two lines of reflection, the first internalist, the second externalist. On the first front, the essay draws attention to how conscience plays a foundational role in Newman’s discussion of natural religion and how it helps to distinguish it from the “religion of civilization,” which Newman considers to be a rationalist substitute for the (...) real religion. If natural religion is structurally grounded in conscience, it is historically illustrated in paganism and primitive religions to the extent to which these come to light in the modern age. Crucially, natural religion has significant content that is endorsed and recalibrated in revealed religion. It uncovers God as Judge and discloses humanity both to be under judgment and hoping for reconciliation through a mediator. The second and more externalist line of reflection draws attention to how Bishop Joseph Butler’s classic Analogy of Religion (1736) provides the basic frame for Newman’s reflection on natural and revealed religion and their relation. (shrink)

H. S. Harris’s Hegel’s Ladder opens up the epic universe of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by constructing a text that is epic in its dimensions and self-conscious design. It aims at truth. In the first instance, this means adequacy with respect to the Phenomenology ’s epic account of humanity’s movement toward self-certain truth. In the second instance, it means correspondence to the epic design of the Phenomenology. For Harris, it is self-evident that the Phenomenology belongs to the genre of epic, (...) since it repeats in a philosophical idiom the form and content of classical Western epics. That Harris accepts, even celebrates the secondariness of his text, vis-à-vis Hegel’s best-known text, does nothing to diminish its intellectual and narrative power. Indeed, with respect to the latter, I want to claim that Hegel’s Ladder rises to the level of a powerful, original epic precisely in its ascesis. Like all powerful texts, Hegel’s Ladder intimidates. Before interpretation so exhaustive, before discernment so perspicacious, any Hegel commentator will fear that whatever he or she has to say will be parochial, redundant, opaque, and intellectually impoverished. (shrink)

One honors a book by straightforwardly recommending it to the reader’s attention. But one also honors a book by taking it seriously enough to imagine how it could have been otherwise, or perhaps better, to the extent that one celebrates its existence, one honors it by imagining a supplement. In what follows I will honor this book in both ways, although clearly the first way is primitive. For it is only by one’s attention being grabbed by a text, by one’s (...) understanding being moved, by one’s sensibilities being engaged that one is involved enough to see beyond the text as presently constituted. InHegel and the Hermetic Tradition there is plenty to grab a Hegel scholar’s attention. Just to start with there is the provocative thesis that Hegel is decisively inf luenced by the Hermetic tradition. Here the provocation is supplied less by the 'shock value' of the thesis - although it may well be shocking to many Hegel scholars - than by the sheer thoroughness - bordering on exhaustiveness - of the analysis which shows mastery of the texts of the highly variegated Hermetic tradition as well as the texts of Hegel, both unpublished and published. There is also much to move the understanding in Magee’s meticulous tracing of the symbols and constructs of Hermeticism at work in Hegel’s texts that range from his pre-Jena writings through the Phenomenology and Encyclopaedia to the Philosophy of Right. And finally there is much to engage one’s sensibilities, for the organization of the text is first class, the reading of Hegel’s texts sensitive and perspicacious, and the writing poised, even elegant. This would be a fine book for a scholar at any stage of his or her career. For a first book it is absolutely exceptional. (shrink)