Guenter Zoeller

Two hundred years after his death, Kant remains one of the most important modern philosophers. The Prolegomena is the ideal introduction to Kant's unique account of the nature human knowledge, according to which we actively shape the world as we know it. This new edition of Kant's own summary of his philosophy is designed specially for students. Guenter Zoeller assumes no prior knowledge of the Prolegomena and provides an extensive and comprehensive introduction which explores Kant's life, the origin and reception of the Prolegomena, the organization of the work, its principal arguments, and its philosophical significance. This edition also includes detailed notes to aid student understanding, as well as a chronology, a glossary and an annotated bibliography.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ästhetische Autonomie als Abnormität: Kritische Analysen zu Schopenhauers Ästhetik im Horizont seiner Willensmetaphysik by Barbara NeymeyrGünter ZöllerBarbara Neymeyr. Ästhetische Autonomie als Abnormität: Kritische Analysen zu Schopenhauers Ästhetik im Horizont seiner Willensmetaphysik. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996. Pp. x + 430. Cloth, DM 250.00.Like a latter-day Janus, Schopenhauer faces the history of philosophy in two directions. As a self-proclaimed follower of Kant and one-time student of Fichte, he partakes in the development of transcendental-idealist philosophy at the beginning of the nineteenth-century. When published in 1818, Schopenhauer’s four-part system of philosophy in The World as Will and Representation, consisting of an epistemology, a philosophy of nature, an aesthetics, and an ethics, was the first philosophical system of German idealism executed in detail. Yet with his orientation toward the natural sciences, from which he sought confirmation of his metaphysics, and through the delayed reception of his work, which began only in the 1850s, Schopenhauer seems to belong to the later nineteenth century, as an immediate precursor of Nietzsche. At the systematic level, the double orientation of [End Page 475] Schopenhauer’s philosophy finds expression in the concurrence of two types of philosophical theory in his work: a transcendental philosophy based on the correlation between a nonworldly subject of cognition and its world of objects, structured according to the basic forms of the principle of sufficient reason, and a metaphysics of the will based on the ultimate reality of everything and everyone as will.The systematic instability that threatens Schopenhauer’s double philosophy of transcendental idealism and voluntaristic metaphysics has prevented his work from being included in the canonical tradition of classical German philosophy and has resulted in a reductive and selective appropriation of parts and aspects of his work, especially focussing on his philosophy of music and his ethics of pity. But recently a number of authors have begun to explore and explain the overall, systematic dimension and potential of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Rudolf Malter has argued forcefully and in great detail for the significance of Schopenhauer as a key figure in the transcendental tradition from Kant to Heidegger, and John Atwell has laid open the systematic ambition and scope of Schopenhauer’s philosophical project of an anthropomorphic cosmology.1Barbara Neymeyr’s thorough and well-informed reading of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics continues this trend toward a systematic Schopenhauer interpretation. The specific focus of her work, a revised doctoral dissertation that had been directed by Gerold Prauss (Freiburg i. Br.), is the systematic integrity, or lack thereof, of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the beautiful. The study soon widens to consider the background of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics in his overall metaphysics of the will. Neymeyr argues that the aesthetic in Schopenhauer occupies a decidedly abnormal systematic position. The norm from which the aesthetic seems to deviate in a radical way is the heteronomy of the intellect in the service of the all-powerful will. Normally, in the nonaesthetic attitude, the intellect is only a tool of the will, providing cognitive illumination to the latter’s originally blind striving. Abnormally though, in the aesthetic attitude, the intellect is supposed to achieve temporary freedom from the will. (Lasting emancipation is afforded only by the ethical, understood as ascetic denial of all willing.) Yet, as Neymeyr argues, in the absence of the will’s driving force, there is no positive basis for any self-determination and intentional activity on the part of the emancipated as well as emaciated aesthetic intellect. Moreover, the role of the will as ultimate reality in Schopenhauer suggests to Neymeyr that the apparent aesthetic emancipation of the intellect from the will is still a case of the will’s ultimate, although clandestine mastery over the intellect. The liberation of the aesthetic intellect from the will is at bottom, so Neymeyr, the cosmic will’s self-liberation from its manifestation as individual will. Thus for Neymeyr, aesthetic autonomy constitutes an inadmissable abnormality in Schopenhauer’s systematic philosophy.Exhibiting great ingenuity and extensive familiarity with the entire corpus of Schopenhauer’s writings, Neymeyr tracks the various levels and forms of inconsistency that [End Page 476] plague Schopenhauer’s aesthetic...

Allerdings findet sich die transzendentale Theorie bei Kant in einiger Verlegenheit, wenn es darumgeht, den Status der apriorischen Bedingungen von Erfahrung positiv zu bestimmen. Reine Anschauung und reines Denken werden als Formelemente aller Erfahrung bzw. von deren Gegenständen verstanden. Die Empirie ist demzufolge ein Kompositum von aposteriorischem Material und apriorischer Form. Kants formalistische Auffassung der transzendentalen Bedingungen von Erfahrung läßt nun das eigentliche Zustandekommen der reinen Formen und den ihrer Formfunktion zugrundeliegenden Status ungeklärt. Mehr noch, Kants Verfahren überträgt die problematische Natur des transzendentalen Bedingungsgefüges auf das von letzterem durch Formpräsenz Begründete. Das in die Erfahrung formend eingegangene reine Anschauen und Denken ist selber keine Erfahrung und scheint auch das dadurch Geformte, die Erfahrung, in den nicht zureichend geklärten Bereich des Nicht-Empirischen hinüberzuziehen.

This is the first book in English on the major works of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It examines the transcendental theory of self and world from the writings of Fichte's most influential period, and considers in detail recently discovered lectures on the Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy. At the center of that body of work stands Fichte's attempt to integrate the theories of volition and cognition into a unified but complex 'system of freedom'. The focus of this book is the intricate interplay between thinking and willing in the birth of experience out of the spirit of freedom. Combining incomparable erudition, sensitive readings of some of the most difficult of philosophical texts, clarity in exposition and an acute awareness of historical context this book takes its place as the ideal introduction to Fichte's thought.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Michael N. ForsterGünter ZöllerMichael N. Forster. Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xi + 661. Paper, $30.00.Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) has remained an enigmatic and controversial work. Typically it has been studied and appropriated selectively, by focusing on a few topics or sections of this immense opus. There are also several commentaries on all or part of the work that immerse the reader in plenty of detail, but often with insufficient attention paid to the work’s overall design. Forster’s book is thematically focused but has sufficient scope to provide the reader with an overall orientation about the Phenomenology. Moreover, it is written in a clear, accessible language, with plenty of genuinely philosophical material to balance the more narrowly exegetical aspects of the study. Forster’s work stands in the tradition of a number of German and French studies that seek to unravel the “genesis and structure” (Hyppolite) of the Phenomenology as a key to understanding and assessing the import of Hegel’s singular work. Forster discusses those earlier readings, subjects them to a thorough critique, and develops original positions on a number of key issues in scholarship on the Phenomenology.The entire first half of the book (Parts One and Two) is concerned with the “official project of the Phenomenology,” which Forster reconstructs as three sets of philosophical tasks. First are the pedagogical tasks designed to introduce the reader to the superior viewpoint of Hegel’s system and its ability to overcome the ills specific to modern culture. In particular, Hegel is shown to further advance Herder’s and Schiller’s philosophical project of replacing the multiple, unreconciled dualisms of the modern intellectual and moral outlook with a unified, monistic account of natural and social reality. In a strong interpretive move, Forster attributes a naturalism of sorts to Hegel’s integrationist account of mind and body or self and world.Second are the epistemological tasks designed to justify the cognitive claims of Hegel’s [End Page 541] system (“science”) against those of all other philosophical and popular viewpoints. In particular, Forster shows Hegel’s indebtedness to the ancient (Pyrronic) skeptical strategy of equipollence, i.e., the method of setting into opposition equally strong arguments on both sides of any issue and thereby producing an equal balance of justification on all sides of the issue. Of all possible viewpoints only Hegel’s own, which is not subject to any external opposition, eludes the scope of the method of equipollence.The third, specifically metaphysical set of tasks of the Phenomenology centers around the work’s social and (on Forster’s reading) naturalist conceptions of God, meaning and truth, in which transcendent warrants are replaced by communal consensus. Forster concludes the first half of his study with a detailed consideration of the relation between the Phenomenology and Hegel’s system proper. He stresses that the work is only the “appearance” (Erscheinung) of the philosophical science itself and that it remains systematically independent of the latter.Part Three examines the role of history and historicism in the Phenomenology. Forster distinguishes between teleological or normative historicism and intellectual or descriptive historicism, and limits his investigation to the latter as the philosophically defensible of the two enterprises. He argues extensively for a one-to-one correlation between the various “shapes of consciousness” to be found in the core of the Phenomenology (from the chapter on Consciousness through the chapter on Reason) and specific periods in human history. This chronological history of consciousness is shown to be supplemented by two further accounts of the history of consciousness (in the chapter on Spirit and in the chapters on Religion and Absolute Knowledge, respectively), in which the first history’s focus on individual consciousness is enlarged to include supra-individual mind (“spirit”).In Part Four Forster explains the tripling of the history of consciousness with a shift in the plan of the Phenomenology, away from the more limited project of the original or “Ur-Phenomenology”—to lead individual consciousness to the viewpoint of (Hegelian) science—to the more ambitious goal...

Since 1962 a group of researchers at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Reinhard Lauth has been publishing the collected works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The Academy edition proceeds chronologically in four parallel series: series 1 contains the works published by Fichte himself; series 2 contains unpublished works; series 3 contains the correspondence; and series 4 contains transcripts of Fichte’s lectures from other hands. The edition is now nearing completion. No other philosophical editorial project worldwide can match it in terms of scope and execution.

This article features the contributions of Fichte and Schopenhauer to a philosophical account of action against the background of Kant's earlier and influential treatment of the topic. The article first presents Kant's pertinent contributions in the areas of general epistemology and metaphysics, general practical philosophy, the philosophy of law and ethic. Then the focus is on Fichte's further original work on the issue of action in those same areas. Finally, the article turns to Schopenhauer's radical revision of the Kantian and Fichtean affirmative accounts of acting and willing through the correlated introduction of the irrational will, the self-negated will and ethical inaction.

Allerdings findet sich die transzendentale Theorie bei Kant in einiger Verlegenheit, wenn es darumgeht, den Status der apriorischen Bedingungen von Erfahrung positiv zu bestimmen. Reine Anschauung und reines Denken werden als Formelemente aller Erfahrung bzw. von deren Gegenständen verstanden. Die Empirie ist demzufolge ein Kompositum von aposteriorischem Material und apriorischer Form. Kants formalistische Auffassung der transzendentalen Bedingungen von Erfahrung läßt nun das eigentliche Zustandekommen der reinen Formen und den ihrer Formfunktion zugrundeliegenden Status ungeklärt. Mehr noch, Kants Verfahren überträgt die problematische Natur des transzendentalen Bedingungsgefüges auf das von letzterem durch Formpräsenz Begründete. Das in die Erfahrung formend eingegangene reine Anschauen und Denken ist selber keine Erfahrung und scheint auch das dadurch Geformte, die Erfahrung, in den nicht zureichend geklärten Bereich des Nicht-Empirischen hinüberzuziehen.