Publisher Description

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.)>

German philosophy remains the core of modern philosophy. This Very Short Introduction discusses the idea that German philosophy forms one of the most revealing responses to the problems of modernity. Including many significant German philosophers, and other more neglected thinkers, he provides an insight into German philosophical traditions.

German Philosophers contains studies of four of the most important German theorists: Kant, arguably the most influential modern philosopher; Hegel, whose philosophy inspired an enduring vision of a communist society; Schopenhauer, renowned for his pessimistic preference for non-existence; andNietzsche, who has been appropriated as an icon by an astonishingly diverse spectrum of people.

Often portrayed as a movement of poets lost in swells of passion, early German Romanticism has been generally overlooked by scholars in favor of the great system-builders of the post-Kantian period, Schelling and Hegel. In the twelve lectures collected here, Manfred Frank redresses this oversight, offering an in-depth exploration of the philosophical contributions and contemporary relevance of early German Romanticism. Arguing that the early German Romantics initiated an original movement away from idealism, Frank brings the leading figures of the movement, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), into concert with contemporary philosophical developments, and explores the role that Friedrich Hölderlin and other members of the Homburg Circle had upon the development of early German Romantic philosophy.

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.

One of the founders of modern philosophical thought Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) has gained the reputation of being one of the most abstruse and impenetrable of thinkers. This major biography of Hegel offers not only a complete account of the life, but also a perspicuous overview of the key philosophical concepts in Hegel's work in a style that will be accessible to professionals and non-professionals alike. Terry Pinkard situates Hegel firmly in the historical context of his times. The story of that life is of an ambitious, powerful thinker living in a period of great tumult dominated by the figure of Napoleon. The Hegel who emerges from this account is a complex, fascinating figure of European modernity, who offers us a still compelling examination of that new world born out of the political, industrial, social, and scientific revolutions of his period.