Gavin Min Prospectus Defense

Gavin Min will be defending his prospectus, "Heidegger’s Hegelian-Theological Structure: Dialectic, Temporality, and the Johannine–Pauline Divide." Faculty and students in the department of philosophy are welcome to attend. Abstract: This dissertation investigates Martin Heidegger’s critique of G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy, arguing that despite their considerable differences, an underlying affinity exists between the two thinkers rooted in a shared Christian worldview. Heidegger famously attacks Hegel’s philosophy as the culmination of onto-theological metaphysics, asserting that Hegel must be “overcome” to inaugurate the “other inception” of thinking. While substantial scholarship has examined the legitimacy and limitations of this critique, existing pro- and anti-Heideggerian readings often relegate Hegel to a purely defensive position. Furthermore, those who acknowledge their affinity frequently fail to uncover its structural and historical origins. Chapter 1 initiates this inquiry by identifying Heidegger’s “quasi-dialectic,” a consistent methodological thread running from his early Freiburg lectures (1919–1920) through Being and Time (1927) to his later works, such as The Origin of the Work of Art (1935–1937) and Identity and Difference (1955–1957). This quasi-dialectical structure resembles the Hegelian dialectic in its movement from naïve immediacy to self-differentiation and negativity; however, Heidegger rejects the speculative moment of final conceptual unity. Instead, he maintains a disclosive horizon that bears through the strife and mutual belonging of opposites without seeking final conceptual reconciliation, leaving the underlying source of this structural affinity an unresolved puzzle. Chapter 2 deepens and refines Karl Löwith’s secularization thesis, which views the modern conception of linear, progressive history as a secularized transformation of Christian eschatology, in order to find a clue to this puzzle. After demonstrating the inadequacy of Löwith’s monolithic framework for encompassing Heidegger’s later event-historical thought, I engage modern New Testament debates to extract Johannine “realized” eschatology and Pauline “inaugurated” eschatology as two distinct, highly conceptualized “ideal types” of biblical temporality, which serve as the symmetrical interpretive keys to both philosophical systems. Chapter 3 deploys this framework to explore the first of these dual axes, demonstrating the structural isomorphism between the Johannine Trinitarian narrative and Hegel’s speculative system as articulated in the Science of Logic and the Encyclopaedia, utilizing the Trinitarian exposition in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion II as the necessary interpretive bridge. I argue that Hegel’s philosophy is a speculative rewriting of Johannine realized eschatology, in which truth is understood as an “already-accomplished” Absolute that becomes explicit through its own historical externalization and recollective return. Chapter 4 examines the counter-axis of Heidegger’s temporality centered on “not-yet,” refuting Franco Volpi’s dominant hypothesis that Being and Time is primarily a phenomenological “translation” of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Through a thematic cluster analysis of core existential concepts—including inauthentic everydayness, anxiety, conscience, resoluteness, authenticity, and ecstatic-horizonal temporality—I prove that it is the Apostle Paul’s eschatological grammar of temporal urgency and existential vigilance that provides the work’s structural backbone. I further argue that this Pauline structure re-emerges in Heidegger’s later reflections on Ereignis and the “other inception,” transformed from an individual-temporal structure into an event-historical one. Chapter 5 converges these parallel philosophical and theological lines of argument to deliver a definitive diagnosis of both their affinity and their divergence. I contend that the similar structures of dialectical negativity identified in Chapter 1 both derive from the Pauline-apocalyptic concept of “katargein.” This concept, reconfigured as “aufheben” (sublate) in Luther’s German translation of the Bible and echoed in his theological legacy of destructio, denotes the deactivation of the prescriptive power of the Law while preserving its essence. Ultimately, the final divergence between the two thinkers is rooted not in a simple philosophical rejection, but in the structural tension between the Johannine “already,” which necessitates speculative reconciliation, and the Pauline “not-yet,” which structurally defers such unity in favor of the uncertainty of death or the unforeseeable openness of Being’s advent. In conclusion, this dissertation challenges the standard narrative of Heidegger “overcoming” Hegel by demonstrating that their divergence is largely indebted to distinct, competing biblical temporalities; proves that both philosophies are fully intelligible only when re-read through their inherited biblical legacies; and offers a new explanatory framework for understanding the continuity between the early and the later Heidegger.

When 10:00 am - 12:00 pm on 23 June 2026
Building STH 525