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Kant and Hegel: Their Religious Philosophies Compared

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Harold E Crichlow
Harold E Crichlow*
Affiliation:
St Michael's Cathedral Barbados
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Abstract

Despite the existence of a Promethean strain in the history of western thought from the Pre-Socratics down to the time of Kant and Hegel, it is fair to say that mankind generally had some kind of belief in the Gods or the one God. Even before recorded history began, people felt surrounded on all sides by superior supernatural beings who inspired terror and who could only be placated by sacrifice – human, animal and plant – the stage of animism. Since Kant and Hegel, despite the rapid and growing secularisation of society and the decline of overt acts of religion in European societies which lead the word in freedom and material development, census figures show that a large number of people still hold some kind of religious belief.

The subject of religion in Kant and Hegel is too wide to be dealt with comprehensively in a paper of this kind, and I shall be looking very briefly at three areas, viz, epistemology where God is presupposed in both systems, freedom through which the religious dimension in human life is expressed, and the possibility of an after-life traditionally treated under the title of the immortality of the soul. God, Freedom and the Immortality of the Soul have been the fundamental issues that have engaged the minds of the great system-builders in philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel.

Type
Hegel and Kant
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 17 , Issue 1: number 33 , Spring/Summer 1996 , pp. 87 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1996

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References

Works cited:

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