Walter Jaeschke

Walter Jaeschke (20 September 1945 – 14 July 2022) was a German philosopher, alongside Georg Lasson and Johannes Hofmeister was one the biggest editors and commentators of classical German philosophers, especially Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He is known in particular for his scholarship on Hegel's philosophy of religion.

Life and works Educated at Freie Universität Berlin and at the Technische Universität Berlin, where he studied philosophy, history of religion, and sinology. Jaeschke earned his doctorate in 1976 with the dissertation Die Suche nach den eschatologischen Wurzeln der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine historische Kritik der Säkularisierungsthese at the Free University of Berlin. His habilitation took place a decade later at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum with the study Die Vernunft in der Religion. Studien zur Grundlegung der Religionsphilosophie Hegels (Stuttgart 1986).

From 1974 to 1989, Jaeschke worked as a research associate at the Hegel Archives 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.

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.