On 14 July 2022, Prof. Walter Jaeschke passed away at the age of 77.
Walter Jaeschke studied philosophy, history of religion and sinology at the Freie Universität Berlin and at the Technischen Universität Berlin and received his doctorate in 1976 with the dissertation Die Suche nach den eschatologischen Wurzeln der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine historische Kritik der Säkularisierungsthese at the Freie Universität Berlin. He completed his habilitation at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum with the study Die Vernunft in der Religion. Studien zur Grundlegung der Religionsphilosophie Hegels (Stuttgart 1986), which has become a milestone for studies on Hegel’s philosophy of religion.
Walter Jaeschke was research associate at the Hegel-Archiv of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum from 1974 to 1989 and at the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften from 1989 to 1998. He was also adjunct professor at the Institute of Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. From 1998 until his retirement in 2010, he was Professor of Philosophy with a special focus on classical German philosophy at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Director of the Hegel-Archiv. In 2014, he was elected a corresponding member of the Nordrhein-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
As a specialist in classical German philosophy, he directed the critical edition of the Gesammelte Werke of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as well as Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Werke (together with Klaus Hammacher) and Jacobi’s Briefwechsel – Nachlaß – Dokumente (from 2013 together with Birgit Sandkaulen). Moreover, he was among the editors of the new critical edition of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher’s works.
In 2003 he published the Hegel-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Schule (J.B. Metzler), a complete reconstruction of Hegel’s life, writings, as well as his Vorlesungsnachschriften. In 2020 he published Hegels Philosophie (Meiner), which brings together various contributions on Hegel’s philosophy with the aim of offering a traverse of his fundamental works and above all a discussion of the problems with which his philosophy has always been confronted, reconstructing their genesis and the subsequent elaboration in printed texts and lectures.
The hegelpd research group joins the entire philosophical community in the memory of a master of historical-philosophical research by sharing the words of Prof. Birgit Sandkaulen (Head of the Forschungszentrums für Klassische Deutsche Philosophie / Hegel-Archiv) and those of Prof. Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer appeared on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.