Publisher Description

In the second half of the eighteenth century, German philosophy came for a while to dominate European philosophy. It changed the way in which not only Europeans, but people all over the world, conceived of themselves and thought about nature, religion, human history, politics, and the structure of the human mind. In this wide-ranging book, Terry Pinkard interweaves the story of 'Germany' - changing during this period from a loose collection of principalities into a newly-emerged nation with a distinctive culture-with an examination of the currents and complexities of its developing philosophical thought. He examines the dominant influence of Kant, with his revolutionary emphasis on 'self-determination', and traces this influence through the development of romanticism and idealism to the critiques of post-Kantian thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. His book will interest a range of readers in the history of philosophy, cultural history and the history of ideas.

The texts in this volume constitute highlights in the movement called transcendental idealism. Includes: Fichte's, "Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar's Vocation," and "A Crystal Clear Report to the General Public..."; Jacobi's, "On Faith and Knowledge in Response to Schelling and Hegel," and "Open Letter to Fichte, 1799"; an anonymous author's "The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism, 1797"; and Schelling's "Ideas on a Philosophy of Nature as an Introduction to the Study of This Science," "Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters," and other texts. (For other texts in German Philosophy see vols. 5, 13, 24, 27, 40, 48, and 78.)>

Comprehensive and incisive, with three new chapters, this updated edition sees world-renowned scholars explore a rich and complex philosophical movement.

Electrifying when first delivered in 1973, legendary in the years since, Dieter Henrich's lectures on German Idealism were the first contact a major German philosopher had made with an American audience since the onset of World War II. They remain one of the most eloquent explanations and interpretations of classical German philosophy and of the way it relates to the concerns of contemporary philosophy. Thanks to the editorial work of David Pacini, the lectures appear here with annotations linking them to editions of the masterworks of German philosophy as they are now available. Henrich describes the movement that led from Kant to Hegel, beginning with an interpretation of the structure and tensions of Kant's system. He locates the Kantian movement and revival of Spinoza, as sketched by F. H. Jacobi, in the intellectual conditions of the time and in the philosophical motivations of modern thought. Providing extensive analysis of the various versions of Fichte's Science of Knowledge, Henrich brings into view a constellation of problems that illuminate the accomplishments of the founders of Romanticism, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, and of the poet Hölderlin's original philosophy. He concludes with an interpretation of the basic design of Hegel's system.

Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century typically focus on its first half—when Hegel, idealism, and Romanticism dominated. By contrast, the remainder of the century, after Hegel's death, has been relatively neglected because it has been seen as a period of stagnation and decline. But Frederick Beiser argues that the second half of the century was in fact one of the most revolutionary periods in modern philosophy because the nature of philosophy itself was up for grabs and the very absence of certainty led to creativity and the start of a new era. In this innovative concise history of German philosophy from 1840 to 1900, Beiser focuses not on themes or individual thinkers but rather on the period’s five great debates: the identity crisis of philosophy, the materialism controversy, the methods and limits of history, the pessimism controversy, and the Ignorabimusstreit. Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Dilthey play important roles in these controversies but so do many neglected figures, including Ludwig Büchner, Eugen Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Fraunstaedt, Hermann Lotze, Adolf Trendelenburg, and two women, Agnes Taubert and Olga Pluemacher, who have been completely forgotten in histories of philosophy. The result is a wide-ranging, original, and surprising new account of German philosophy in the critical period between Hegel and the twentieth century.

Terry Pinkard draws on Hegel's central works as well as his lectures on aesthetics, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history in this deeply informed and original exploration of Hegel's naturalism. As Pinkard explains, Hegel's version of naturalism was in fact drawn from Aristotelian naturalism: Hegel fused Aristotle's conception of nature with his insistence that the origin and development of philosophy has empirical physics as its presupposition. As a result, Hegel found that, although modern nature must be understood as a whole to be non-purposive, there is nonetheless a place for Aristotelian purposiveness within such nature. Such a naturalism provides the framework for explaining how we are both natural organisms and also practically minded (self-determining, rationally responsive, reason-giving) beings. In arguing for this point, Hegel shows that the kind of self-division which is characteristic of human agency also provides human agents with an updated version of an Aristotelian final end of life. Pinkard treats this conception of the final end of "being at one with oneself" in two parts. The first part focuses on Hegel's account of agency in naturalist terms and how it is that agency requires such a self-division, while the second part explores how Hegel thinks a historical narration is essential for understanding what this kind of self-division has come to require of itself. In making his case, Hegel argues that both the antinomies of philosophical thought and the essential fragmentation of modern life are all not to be understood as overcome in a higher order unity in the "State." On the contrary, Hegel demonstrates that modern institutions do not resolve such tensions any more than a comprehensive philosophical account can resolve them theoretically. The job of modern practices and institutions (and at a reflective level the task of modern philosophy) is to help us understand and live with precisely the unresolvability of these oppositions. Therefore, Pinkard explains, Hegel is not the totality theorist he has been taken to be, nor is he an "identity thinker," à la Adorno. He is an anti-totality thinker.