@article{Revelation:4731,
      recid = {4731},
      author = {Haydt, Joseph A},
      title = {Revelation and Thought: A Study in the Age of Goethe},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-08},
      pages = {259},
      abstract = {This dissertation shows that the unity of the  philosophical, religious, and aesthetic developments during  the period 1770–1830 only comes fully to light when viewed  with respect to debates on the concept of divine  revelation. The connection between religion and philosophy  during this period is not written on the surface of the  major texts. To solicit the animating religious issues,  this study employs an interdisciplinary approach that draws  both on recent reassessments of German Idealism (e.g.,  Pippin, McDowell, Brandom) and on twentieth-century  philosophical theology. My argument turns on a comparison  of the Idealist philosophical position with the  theorization of revelation articulated by the Swiss  theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. Following von Balthasar,  I contend that the concept of divine revelation rests on  epistemological categories that Kant, Fichte, and Hegel  sought to overcome, specifically the categories of  non-conceptual knowledge, mystery, and rational finitude.  The guiding Idealist notion of an autonomous,  self-articulating reason amounts to a sustained and  sophisticated rejection of invocations of divine revelation  as an explanation of religious belief and faith practices.  Moreover, approaching this material from the standpoint of  theology makes it possible to show that Goethe’s  theorization of the revelation of nature in his Farbenlehre  and in his scientific work more generally constitutes a  substantive alternative to the views of his philosophical  contemporaries. Indeed, his complex conception of human  finitude anticipates 20th-century notions of finitude that  would receive canonical formulation in the work of Martin  Heidegger.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4731},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4731},
}