ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Kant's essay on religion. It focuses on the hermeneutic dimension of Die Religion, and uses this as the basis for discussing the development of the central post-Kantian preoccupation with history and revelation. Die Religion attempts to complete the journey begun in the discussion of practical reason, and fill in the detail of what is involved in the moral life. Among the first readers of Die Religion were the theological students at the Protestant seminary (Stift) in Tübingen. Developing the possibilities hinted at, but also kept in check, by Kant's Religion forms the central preoccupation of a series of essays produced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel between 1798 and 1800, when he was in Frankfurt but still preoccupied with the issues that had arisen in Tübingen. Friedrich Hölderlin's first Homburg period, from 1798 to 1800, was a time of great development in his thinking, when the contours of his poetic project emerged quite strikingly.
