Kant, Fichte, and the Legacy of Transcendental Idealism contains ten new essays by leading and rising scholars from the United States, Europe, and Asia who explore the historical development and ...conceptual contours of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy.
This volume of 23 previously unpublished essays explores the relationship between the philosophy of J.G. Fichte and that of other leading thinkers associated with German Idealism and the early ...Romantic movement. Several papers explore the broader question of Fichte's relationship and contribution to "German idealism" and "German romanticism" in general, while others offer comparative studies of the relationship between Fichte's writings and those of Leibniz, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Schleiermacher, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Taken collectively, this set of essays provides anglophone readers with a new and historically accurate understanding of the origin, development, and reception of Fichte's philosophy in the context of its own era and in relationship to the most important intellectual movements of the time. The authors include both well established and internationally recognized experts in their fields as well as younger scholars with fresh and challenging perspectives to offer. This volume proposes a new interpretation of the history of German idealism in general and of the place therein of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. It emphasizes the intimate connection between "transcendental idealism" and "German romanticism" and shows how developments within each of these intellectual movements reflected and in turn influenced developments within the other. Finally, it sheds new light on Fichte's own philosophical development and does so by relating the various stages of his writings to other contemporary movements and authors.
At first glance it may be odd to turn to Friedrich Hölderlin in order to discuss problems of self-consciousness. Hölderlin, you may say, was a poet and not a philosopher. Of course, Hölderlin was a ...poet, but nevertheless he was very well acquainted with the philosophical problems of his days. What is more he played an important role within the post-kantian philosophy, especially within the advanced discussions about self-consciousness – more precisely concerning the problem of defining the logical structure of the concept of self-consciousness and its role as a grounding principle of philosophy. Our source is a text by Hölderlin which was edited by Friedrich Beißner in 1961. Beißner baptized it “Über Urteil und Seyn” – ‘On Judgment and Being’, following the keywords at the beginning of the two sections of the text. In the following, I will not deal with the special historical circumstances of this text. I rather want to show its systematic importance with regard to the concept of self-consciousness, especially with regard to recent theories which understand self-consciousness in terms of self-representation. Here Hölderlin can be a systematically important interlocutor. My first claim is that Hölderlin in discussing the logical structure of the concept of self-consciousness applies the conceptual framework of self-representationalism. My second claim is that Hölderlin at once criticizes the self-representationalistic view of self-consciousness. My third claim concerns the way Hölderlin proposes a new explanation of self-consciousness. This explanation entails two steps: The first step refers to a conceptual unity of – as he writes – subject and object which must be presupposed and which cannot be understood by terms of representation; Hölderlin calls it “Seyn” – “Being”. The second step in turn can be divided into two parts: the first part argues that the concept of self-consciousness depends logically on this unity; the second part holds that only due to this relationship a representational concept of self-consciousness is possible. Therefore we have two different claims of a theory of self-consciousness which stand in a necessary connection, first: self-consciousness can be conceptualized by means of self-representationalism; second: self-consciousness can be conceptualized by means of self-representationalism if and only if it is grounded by a non-representational unity called ‘being’. This sounds paradoxical and puzzling. But we should not run away and shut the door behind us. Instead I would like to show that Hölderlin’s proposal makes sense.
This monograph discusses the importance of A. L. Hülsen's only book for the history of early German idealism. The Wissenschaftslehre is Fichte's ""response"" to the objections of Schulze-Aenesidemus ...to Reinhold's early Elementarphilosophie. Hülsen, a Fichtean thinker, restructured many aspects of Reinhold's system which Fichte left intact. In 1797, Fichte recognized Hülsen as a partner in the development of his system, thus acknowledging his contribution to the emergence of German idealism.
Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism explores some long neglected but crucial themes in German idealism. Markus Gabriel, one of the most exciting young voices in ...contemporary philosophy, and Slavoj ++i++ek, the celebrated contemporary philosopher and cultural critic, show how these themes impact on the problematic relations between being and appearance, reflection and the absolute, insight and ideology, contingency and necessity, subjectivity, truth, habit and freedom. Engaging with three central figures of the German idealist movement, Hegel, Schelling and Fichte, Gabriel and ++i++ek, who here shows himself to be one of the most erudite and important scholars of German idealism, ask how is it possible for Being to appear in reflection without falling back into traditional metaphysics. By applying idealistic theories of reflection and concrete subjectivity, including the problem of madness and everydayness in Hegel, this hugely important book aims to reinvigorate a philosophy of finitude and contingency, topics at the forefront of contemporary European philosophy.
This essay reflects on the history of German monetary nationalism by examining texts written by two Romantic thinkers, Fichte's Der geschlossene Handelsstaat (1800) and Müller's Versuche einer neuen ...Theorie des Geldes (1816), that articulate theories of German nationhood based on the community-building power of monetary symbols. It argues that these theories of economic union preceded Romantic conceptions of German nationhood grounded in ethno-linguistic or racial criteria, and that in this respect these Romantic ideas anticipate the economic unification of Germany that has characterized its history since 1945.
This article analyzes how Lazarus Bendavid and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in their 1793 texts, presented similar fantasies of integrating Jews into the state by decapitating Jewish heads. Such fantasies ...reached back to the Kantian foundation of each philosopher's conception of humanity and morality. Approaching the question of extending civil rights to Jews from the standpoint of the normative Kantian moral subject, both Bendavid and Fichte came to the conclusion that the only way to accommodate Jews into the civil sphere was through the paradoxical and gruesome means of (symbolic) decapitation. Because it dramatically exemplifies possible dangers in Kantian moral universalism, Bendavid's peripheral and aberrant contribution to the celebrated corpus of Jewish Kantian philosophy can productively complicate how that tradition understood itself and how we continue to see it.
