Heiberg's

On the Significance of
Philosophy for the Present Age

and Other Texts
 

Heiberg's

Speculative Logic
and Other Texts

Heiberg's

Introductory Lecture to

the Logic Course

and Other Texts
 

Heiberg's

Contingency Regarded from the Point of View of Logic

and Other Texts

 

Mynster's

"Rationalism, Supernaturalism" and the Debate about Mediation

Heiberg's

Perseus and Other Texts

The poet and part-time philosopher Johan Ludvig Heiberg published the first issue of his review Perseus, Journal for the Speculative Idea in June of 1837 as a part of his long-standing campaign to convert his Golden Age contemporaries to G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophical system. The journal was created in large part as a result of a dispute that Heiberg had with the editorial board of the prestigious Maanedsskrift for Litteratur about an article that he had submitted. Feeling unfairly persecuted, Heiberg retracted his submission and resolved to found a new philosophical journal of his own, in which his controversial piece could be published. Thus Perseus was born. In his prefatory address to the journal’s readers, Heiberg calls upon the Greek hero Perseus to be the champion for the cause of Hegelian idealism and to do battle with the pernicious Medusa of realism and empiricism.

Although Heiberg’s Hegelian review only appeared in two issues in 1837 and 1838, it was widely read and discussed among Danish students and intellectuals of the time. It was reviewed at length by the philosopher Frederik Christian Sibbern and satirized by Søren Kierkegaard in Prefaces. There can be no doubt that Heiberg’s Perseus represents a landmark in Golden Age culture.

"In his efforts to make the central philosophical texts from the Danish Golden Age accessible to international readers, Jon Stewart has now taken on Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s journal Perseus (1837-38). This was the first of three journals that followed Heiberg’s popular Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post (1827-37), all of which had a culturally aristocratic air about them: Perseus, Intelligensblade and Urania. Of particular significance, Perseus was an organ for Hegelian philosophy in Heiberg’s own unique distillation. In his long review of V.H. Rothe’s theological dissertation, which fills the better part of this volume, Heiberg claims that the Hegelian triad is the reflection of the Trinity in the realms of logic, nature and spirit. Philosophy synthesizes these three spheres into a whole and can achieve knowledge of God, whereas both rationalism and orthodoxy, each in its own way, fall into error. This review is an important source for understanding both Heiberg’s philosophy of life and the intellectual climate in Denmark around 1840."

Johnny Kondrup
University of Copenhagen