Andrew W. Hass

Hegel and the Negation of the Apophatic

This chapter looks at the strained yet fecund relationship between Hegel and the apophatic. For on the one hand Hegel is known as the champion of revelation, of enunciated truth in its most manifest expression as world Spirit. Yet, on the other hand, this manifestation is regulated by an ever-present negation, so that Hegel becomes the impetus for so much thinking around the apophatic in later modernity. Hass argues that, rather than allow this ambiguity to preclude Hegel from the great tradition of apophatic thinking, its very internal division becomes constitutive of a negation that goes to the heart of all apophatics. This “negation of the apophatic”, in its circular construction, is developed through the denying, the re-cognizing, the generating and the protecting of apophatics, to end at the “beginning of Hegel”, which becomes the bringing forth of what cannot be said across all Hegel.

A case of misrepresentation: James L. Cox and Steven J. Sutcliffe, ‘‘Religious studies in Scotland: A persistent tension with divinity’’ [Religion 36 (1) (March 2006) 1e28]: A response from Religion at Stirling

A PhD student1 in our department who has a background in classical studies and is now researching the use of the World Wide Web by pagan groups was the first to see this survey on religious studies in Scotland. She felt worried at the time by the way the article misrepresented what we did at Stirling. Coming from another country to do postgraduate studies in religion here, she felt people in her country reading this journal would be given a false impression that could affect her career prospects. In particular the article stated that the typical orientation of the department at Stirling was ‘traditional textual-hermeneutical methodologies of Theology and Divinity’ when she, and subsequently the rest of us, felt this bore little relation to the breadth of what was actually being taught. Why was there no mention of the interdisciplinarity of our approach or the centrality of feminist, critical and postcolonial theory? Overall we felt there had been too little investigation of the kinds of modules which were actually being offered at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, or of the kinds of research and publications that members of the department were producing, including Fiona Darroch e not mentioned at all in the report e who at that time was and still is researching and teaching Caribbean literature and religion.