Jeffrey Reid

Scholar and philosopher Jeffrey Reid’s latest monograph, Reason and Revelation in Hegel, offers a new understanding of Hegel’s metaphysical thought, centring on the Absolute’s self-revelatory agency – its unfolding through nature, human thought, and history. Structured in four sections, the book explores absolute agency and the relationship between eternal truth and historical temporality. How does absolute presence take place in art, religion, and philosophy? Finally, questions of systematicity and meaning are engaged with reference to the Big Bang universe, our experience of music, and the question of what Hegel’s Science leaves behind. Reason and Revelation in Hegel stands out in the landscape of Hegelian studies, where dominant trends often downplay metaphysical dimensions in favor of analytic, materialist, and secular interpretations. Rather than reducing Hegel’s religious ideas to cultural phenomena or aspirational human consciousness, Reid argues that the Absolute is not a distant metaphysical object but an active, performative force within rational human striving itself. In this view, the failures of historical actuality become openings for philosophical truth – shaped by, and inseparable from, eternal revelation.

Both continental and analytic traditions have tended to associate Hegel’s idealism with metaphysics and therefore as divorced from and even pernicious to reality. Hence, contemporary Hegel studies have tended to concentrate on discrete elements of his philosophy while attempting to avoid its metaphysical dimensions and their systematic pretensions. I seek to show that rather than dwelling in abstraction, Hegel’s metaphysics, as presented in his Logics, recount the thought determinations through which being comes to be grounded and thus, scientifically knowable as nature. Such categorical determining is essentially linguistic, taking place through the grammatical forms of judgment (Urteil) and their outcome in the syllogism. The centrality of these grammatical forms reveals the anthropological goal of Hegel’s metaphysics, where the fully determined copula of judgment presents itself as the object of natural science, for us.