Between the indivisible Being that is always the same and the divisible Being that comes to be in the case of bodies he compounded a third 25 form of Being from both. (35a1–4)

Introduction

First, it is necessary to (1) state the reason why Plato provides a genesis of the soul when its origins are ungenerated according to him. Next, it is requisite to (2) divide the whole psychogenesis in respect of the manner in which it takes place; (3) to indicate the sense in which the soul is an intermediate; (4) to speak about these genera from which both the soul and other things have been established; (5) we must undertake to say how mixing of these kinds takes place in the case of soul; (6) to explain what sort of thing the divisible and indivisible kinds of Being are; (7) to make the individual words of Plato's text understandable and show that they are entirely consistent with what was said before. Should we come to be able to apprehend these things in words (tôi logôi), then we will have realised the goal of the present inquiry in the manner that is consonant with our abilities.

Why Plato speaks as if the soul was generated when its origins are ungenerated

Theophrastus’ objection

Let us therefore begin from the first point because some of the ancient philosophers rebuke Plato and say: ‘he incorrectly searches for a principle of a principle and a genesis of an ungenerated thing. For if we look for the causes of the things that are primary and set our minds on the genesis of things that are self-subsistent (authypostatos), we shall fail to see that we shall be going on to infinity and have no end of our inquiries. For just as the person who thinks that all things are capable of demonstration actually does away with demonstration itself, so too the person who seeks after causes in this manner entirely overturns all the existent things and the order in which they they proceed from some definite principle’ (Fortenbaugh (1992), fr. 159).

Containing the material cosmos: Tim. 36d8–e1

When the entire psychic composite had come about in accordance with the intellect (kata noun) of the one who created it, after this he framed allthat is corporeal inside of it. (Tim. 36d8–e1)

The first chapter of the discourse on the soul, as we said earlier (125.12) concerns the nature of its existence (hyparxis), while the second chapter is concerned with its harmony. The third chapter deals with the shape, and the fourth with the soul's powers. The fifth chapter deals with its activities. In all the other subjects, therefore, the philosopher has taught us most completely, but this final chapter was about the activities of the soul which he surely appends in these words. But since the form of activities in the soul is two-fold – I mean those pertain to knowing (gnôstikos) and those that are to do with motion (kinêtikos) – he will give one account that is specific to the motive powers and another one that is specific to the cognitive powers. So he will convey to us both how it moves other things by moving itself, and also how, in knowing itself, it knows the things that are prior to it and also those that are posterior to it. Such, therefore, is the purpose (skopos) of the words before us.

He did not, however, present us with any teaching about a plurality of souls in what has gone before, as some would have it, who say that the first part concerning the soul's essence dealt with what they call the unrelated (aschetos) soul, while the chapter on harmony dealt with what they call the related soul (tên en schesei), and the chapter on shape dealt with the soul that is coordinated with the body (tên en katataxei). Nor [does this part of the Timaeus deal with a multitude of souls in another sense], as others have written, saying that it introduces a single soul and seven hypercosmic souls (II. 273.26–33). That nothing like this is the case has, I think, been made sufficiently clear through what Timaeus says. For the soul that has been created by the Father in accordance with his intellect, he conjoins to the universe, arranging that which is corporeal within it.

Hegel's letter to Immanuel Niethammer, dated April 19, 1817, indicates that he consciously intended his lengthy and for the most part positive review to help effect a reconciliation with Jacobi, whom his scathing remarks in Faith and Knowledge (1802) had deeply estranged. Hegel writes,

Just a few months later, Hegel was instrumental in persuading the University of Heidelberg to grant Jacobi's close friend Jean Paul, the novelist, an honorary doctorate, and no doubt this new friendship between Hegel and Jean Paul also helped facilitate the rapprochement between Hegel and Jacobi. In any case, in a letter dated September 3, 1817, Jean Paul confirms Jacobi's impression of a convergence, writing, “Hegel has come much closer to you, except for just one point concerning the will.”

The reviewer is pleased that a new volume of Jacobi's collected works has appeared so soon after the last, and wishes both that noble elder and his readers all the best for the uninterrupted continuation of their publication. This third volume contains four writings which, in the words of the preface, “to a certain extent originated simultaneously and are but divergent parts of a single whole that recapitulates itself differently in each of them.” They are: (1) Jacobi's Letter to Fichte, first published in 1799; (2) an essay which first appeared in Reinhold's Contributions (no. 31, 1801), with the title On Critical Philosophy's Attempt to Bring Reason to Understanding and to Transform Philosophy as Such; (3) On a Prophecy by Lichtenberg, first printed in 1801; and (4) the text On Divine Things and their Revelation, with a foreword written for this new edition. An interesting appendix of twenty-three letters to Johann Müller, Georg Forster, Herder, Kant (among them one from Kant to Jacobi), Privy Councillor Schlosser, J. G. Jacobi, and several unnamed recipients concludes the volume.

[SPINOZA]

One might have wished that in the order of publication of these collected works Jacobi's earlier Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza5 had preceded the treatises contained in the present volume, for these Letters respond to an historical interest that is older and prior to the forms of philosophy dealt with by these treatises, namely the metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff, which at the time of the Letters was at its last breath.

This work brings together, for the first time in English translation, Hegel's journal publications from his years in Heidelberg (1816–18), writings which have been previously either untranslated or only partially translated into English. The two years Hegel taught at the University of Heidelberg mark an unusually important transition in his life and thought. Following the closing of the University of Jena in the wake of Napoleon's famous victory at the Battle of Jena, Hegel was unable to find a university teaching position. After a decade in which he worked briefly as a newspaper editor and then as a gymnasium rector, Hegel returned to a university teaching position as Professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg in 1816. During his two years at Heidelberg, before he left to take up his final academic position in Berlin, Hegel brought to fruition a number of projects that characterize the mature phase of his work: he published the first version of his mature philosophical system, the Encyclopedia; served as editor of a journal, the Heidelberger Jahrbücher der Literatur (Heidelberg Yearbooks), which published two important contributions of his own; and began to give the first public lectures in which his developed social and political philosophy was on display.

The move to Heidelberg marked not only an important milestone for Hegel personally, but also came – as Hegel himself articulated it in this period – during a crucial generational shift in the larger political and philosophical climate in Germany and Europe. Hegel's generation, which had witnessed the beginning of the French Revolution twenty-five years before, had seen in the intervening years the swift overthrow of old philosophical systems as well as political upheavals stemming from Napoleon's rise and fall.

[INTRODUCTION]

The task that was begun two and a half years ago – of introducing a representative constitution and thereby bringing to completion a German monarchy that has arisen in our time – awakened from its beginning such a universal interest in the German public that nothing could be more agreeable to it than the publication of the Proceedings of the Württemberg Estates Assembly. In place of the hopes which accompanied the beginning and the progress of this effort, there must appear at the end a result and the judgment of it. The thirty-three volumes with which this review is concerned of course do not yet contain the completion of the main goal, but they do form an historical whole. For, on the one hand, they present the progress up to the death of the king who founded the monarchy and who began the second step – the inner, free structuring of that monarchy – and the characteristic development of this event in its principal features falls within his reign. On the other hand, the work of the Estates appears to have been brought to completion, since a representative committee is finished with its draft of a constitution, which likewise has appeared in print.

Of course, these Proceedings present only one side of the efforts of that endeavor: the public efforts, insofar as they enter into the Estates Assembly.