Hegels Philosophie der Dichtung (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 113 worth; it alone should make the book indispensable to all university libraries.) However, the brevity required of papers in such a conference makes it impossible in any case for a contributor to deal with secondary literature. Hence the above stricture should not be given undue weight. One wonders, though, if six essays twice the length of these might not have advanced the understanding of Hegel more. In a brief Foreword the three editors remark that the Hegel renaissance has "brought with it a rebirth of the history of philosophy as something relevant to our own problems." Surely this is a fact of real significance after an epoch of dominance by analytic philosophy in which the history of philosophy was regarded as largely a history of errors and was scandalously neglected . To be sure, it is still too early to say whether this rebirth will produce fresh advances in philosophy or simply antiquarian learning for its own sake. If we are guided by Hegel's spirit, we can learn to use philosophy's history, not be absorbed by it. In a necessarily brief review, it is impossible to give readers much notion of the content of these twelve essays. In the first two papers Robert Caponigri and Quentin Lauer deal with Hegel's conception of the history of philosophy in its relation to his Logic and to philosophy as such. Both clearly locate a central problem in Hegel in their largely descriptive accounts.Then Joseph Flay takes up the same problem in the narrower focus of the Phenomenology; he argues that the search for certainty is the central theme of this great work. These three papers belong together and illuminate each other in a revealing fashion. All the others are concerned with less general issues in the Hegelian corpus. However, three others likewise form a unity. John Smith, Peter Laska, and Heimo E. M. Hofmeister deal with Hegel's critique of Kant. Smith's piece concerns Hegel's general disagreement with Kantian epistemology and metaphysics, whereas the other two focus on differences between the moral views of Kant and Hegel. Both Laska and Hofmeister find justice in the Hegelian objections to Kant's moral system while disagreeing with Hegel's own ethics. All three essays are carefully done and among the most valuable in the book. Perhaps the most controversial paper is John Findlay's "Hegelianism and Platonism" in which he argues for a profound affinity of the two philosophers, much as in his earlier book on Hegel he discovered Aristotle to be Hegel's progenitor. This reviewer's objections to Findlay's position were largely anticipated by Lucia Palmer inthe suceeding paper "On Hegel's Platonism " devoted to a criticism of Findlay's contribution. The four essays by Frederick G. Weiss, "Cartesian Doubt and Hegelian Negation," Daniel J. Cook, "Leibniz and Hegel on Language," George L. Kline, "Hegel and Solovyov," and Max Fisch, "Hegel and Pierce," are largely unrelated to each other and to those mentioned above. Of necessity the latter two deal with Solovyov and Pierce more than with Hegel, though both are instructive in this regard. Cooke's essay gives Leibniz's and Hegel's evaluation of the German language and is hence concrete as discussions of language rarely are. It is difficult to imagine either the beginning student of Hegel or the advanced scholar who will not be enlightened in some way by a study of these Proceedings. Far more than similar volumes, it reveals "Hegel's profound presence in the mainstream of past and present thought" (Foreword). J. GLENN GRAY Colorado College Hegels Philosophic der Dichtung. By Frank Dietrich Wagner. Abhandlungen zur Philosophie, Psychologie und P~idagogik, Band 88. (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert G rundmann, 1974. Pp. 213. Paper, DM 39) Frank Dietrich Wagner argues that Hegel's philosophy of literature has not to date received a thorough interpretation and that, particularly in our.time, no one has even attempted to assess the adequacy of that theory in light of its unity (p. 10). While most recent theorists of 114 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY literature have ignored Hegel's contribution completely or at most given it passing mention with no appreciation of its validity...