Frederick Beiser

The aim of this article is to reassess Herder’s complex attitude toward the Jews. The liberal image of Herder made him into a philo-Semitic humanitarian who greatly valued Jewish culture. Recently, however, Paul Lawrence Rose has argued that Herder has been misread as a protoliberal and that he did not advocate anything like Jewish emancipation; rather, Herder adopted a “statist” view which tolerated Jews in the modern state only to the extent that they were useful to it. Against Rose’s criticism, this chapter argues that although Herder did not conceive of different cultures within one state, he still insisted upon tolerance toward minorities and peoples of different cultures. While Herder did share some prevalent negative views about Jews, his general opinion was highly positive and he expressly ascribed their negative characteristics to their oppression, their compulsory confinement to trade. Herder believed that prejudices against Jews would disappear with greater political reform.

This chapter will attempt to resolve a dispute between Frederick Beiser and Manfred Frank about the relationship between romanticism and idealism. In _German Idealism_ Beiser placed the romantics within the German idealist movement, seeing them as part of the same tradition as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This aroused the objection of Frank, which appears in his _Auswege aus dem deutschen Idealismus_, and others who follow him (viz., Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert in her _Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy_). They claim that romanticism and idealism are opposed movements because idealist is foundationalist whereas romanticism is antifoundationalist. This chapter argues that this debate partly rests on a confusion between methodological and metaphysical issues: that the romantics had an idealist metaphysics even though they did not share the methodology of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. There are other issues causing confusion, viz., who precisely do we want to regard as a romantic, which the chapter also attempts to sort out.

This article is a brief account of the context, genesis, and intention behind Hermann Lotze’s Mikrokosmus, his three-volume largely forgotten magnum opus. Lotze’s work was an attempt to resolve the conflict between science and faith that became especially intense during the second half of the 19th century. He aimed to create a new anthropology to answer the question of what meaning human life had in the cosmos, responding to new advances in chemistry, physics, and biology. In his defense of theism and critique of materialism (part of German philosophy’s materialism controversy), Lotze believed that he could resolve this conflict not only by a new distinction between scientific mechanism and teleology, but also by an even newer distinction between value and reality. Lotze’s distinction between the realms of value and reality, and validity and existence, are still fundamental for modern thought.

This article is an examination of Herbart’s alleged “realism”. It argues that Herbart cannot be considered a realist in the usual modern senses of the term, because he denies that we have a direct or an inferential knowledge of reality itself. He insists that all that we directly know is our own representations, and he denies that we can have any knowledge of things-in-themselves. Herbart affirmed that he was a realist for the same reason that Kant denied that he was an idealist. Like Kant, Herbart affirmed the existence of things-in-themselves, and he disputed Berkeley’s dictum esse est percipi. Nevertheless, Herbart’s metaphysics makes two important departures from Kant’s transcendental idealism: first, in allowing inferences beyond possible experience, and, second, in affirming that the relations between things are given in experience.

This article is an examination of Herbart’s alleged “realism”. It argues that Herbart cannot be considered a realist in the usual modern senses of the term, because he denies that we have a direct or an inferential knowledge of reality itself. He insists that all that we directly know is our own representations, and he denies that we can have any knowledge of things-in-themselves. Herbart affirmed that he was a realist for the same reason that Kant denied that he was an idealist. Like Kant, Herbart affirmed the existence of things-in-themselves, and he disputed Berkeley’s dictum esse est percipi. Nevertheless, Herbart’s metaphysics makes two important departures from Kant’s transcendental idealism: first, in allowing inferences beyond possible experience, and, second, in affirming that the relations between things are given in experience.

This book is an attempt to recover a neglected chapter of the history of philosophy: the history of early German positivism, 1860–1914. It treats figures almost completely forgotten in the German and Anglo-American worlds: Theodor Gomperz (1832–1912), Eugen Dühring (1833–1921), Ernst Laas (1837–85), and Friedrich Jodl (1849–1914); it also examines Ernst Mach (1838–1916) and Richard Avenarius (1843–1896), who are much better known but contemporaries of these thinkers. The first four of these figures became famous, and published their major works, before the formation of the (first) Vienna Circle in 1912. Several positivist themes unite these thinkers: rejection of the synthetic a priori; opposition to pessimism; a philosophy of monism, naturalism, and historicism; and the belief that the highest good can be achieved only under the guidance of science. Positivism was thus a continuation of the Enlightenment into the 20th century. The examination of early positivism makes it necessary to question several claims made about positivism by Michael Friedman: that the positivists’ main concerns did not arise within the empiricist tradition; that the positivist rejection of the synthetic a priori arose from developments in geometry; that there is no foundationalism within positivism. Placing positivism in this broader intellectual context makes all these claims questionable. The aim throughout is to place positivism in a wider intellectual context, which goes back to the Enlightenment and the opposition to the Christian tradition.

Hegel (1770-1831) is one of the major philosophers of the nineteenth century. Many of the major philosophical movements of the twentieth century - from existentialism to analytic philosophy - grew out of reactions against Hegel. He is also one of the hardest philosophers to understand and his complex ideas, though rewarding, are often misunderstood. In this magisterial and lucid introduction, Frederick Beiser covers every major aspect of Hegel's thought. He places Hegel in the historical context of nineteenth-century Germany whilst clarifying the deep insights and originality of Hegel's philosophy. A masterpiece of clarity and scholarship, _Hegel_ is both the ideal starting point for those coming to Hegel for the first time and essential reading for any student or scholar of nineteenth century philosophy. Additional features: glossary chapter summaries chronology annotated further reading.

Is humor an antidote for pessimism? One philosopher who saw humor as the only redemption in a world filled with suffering and sorrow was Julius Bahnsen (1830–81), one of the most radical pessimists of the German pessimistic tradition (1860–1900). After a brief account of the life of Bahnsen, I sketch his tragic philosophy of life, according to which life is filled with inevitable and irresolvable contradictions. The only respite from the suffering created by these contradictions, he taught, came with humor. Against his contemporary Nietzsche, Bahnsen held that art could not serve as a source of redemption from the tragedy of life. True art revealed suffering and did not try to conceal it; and true redemption came only after utter honesty, recognizing the horrors of life while still laughing at them.

This book addresses the question of the nature and the immortality of the human soul in the context of Immanuel Hermann Fichte's philosophical anthropology. In particular, it undertakes a systematic and immanent reconstruction of Fichte's argument for the substantiality, individuality, preexistence, and perduration of the human soul. This monographic investigation fills a research gap which is long pending and offers not only impulses for research on late idealism, but also and above all important insights and guiding principles for a philosophy of the human spirit adequate for the present.

This article is a defense of the history of ideas as traditionally understood. The history of ideas, as originally conceived, attempted to be both historical and philosophical. Its historical dimension consisted in placing ideas in their historical context and understanding the intentions behind the author; its philosophical dimension consisted in criticism, the internal critique of an author according to his own aims. Modern intellectual or philosophical history has separated these two components. There is the analytical history of philosophy which aims to be primarily critical or philosophical, and the historical Cambridge school which aims to be chiefly historical. The article argues that the history of philosophy is best pursued by joining the philosophical and historical approaches; it attempts to show how the attempt to pursue history without philosophy, or philosophy without history, breaks down and suffers from inevitable shortcomings.

Usually, the history of philosophy in the first two decades after the publication of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) in May 1781 is seen as little more than commentary upon and criticism of Kant's classic text. It is chiefly a story about how Kant's successors tried to defend and systematize, or criticize and dismember, his philosophy. The main theme of this story is the central outstanding problem of Kant's philosophy: the transcendental deduction, the problem of the possibility of empirical knowledge. The various approaches to this problem, their formation and demise, is essentially the history of the Kantian philosophy itself. Such, at any rate, is the picture that emerges from the solid studies of Karl Rosenkranz, Johannes Erdmann, Nicolai Hartmann, Josiah Royce, Richard Kroner, and Ernst Cassirer.