Walter Jaeschke

Walter Jaeschke (20 September 1945 – 14 July 2022) was a German philosopher, educated at Freie Universität Berlin and at the Technischen Universität Berlin, where he studied philosophy, history of religion, and sinology. He directed the critical Gesammelte Werke edition of the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He also co-directed critical editions of the works of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. Jaeschke is known in particular for his scholarship on Hegel's philosophy of religion.[1][2]

Jaeschke earned his doctorate in 1976 with the dissertation The Search for the Eschatological Roots of the Philosophy of History at the Free University of Berlin. His habilitation took place a decade later at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum with the study Reason in Religion: Studies on the Foundations of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion (Stuttgart 1986). (Titles translated from the German.)

From 1974 to 1989, Jaeschke worked as a research associate at the Hegel Archive of the Ruhr-Universität, and from 1989 to 1998, he worked as a research associate at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He was also an extraordinary professor at the Institute of Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. From 1998 until his retirement in 2010, he worked as a professor of philosophy with a special focus on German Idealism at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, as well as the director of the Hegel Archive there, where the critical edition of Hegel's works is being developed. In 2014, he was elected as a corresponding member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.[3]