Daniel Dahlstrom

Immanuel Kant's "critical philosophy" is rightly renowned for its criticism of the metaphysical pretensions of reason unaided by experience. It therefore seems ironic that, within a single generation, some of Kant's most important followers argued that the critical philosophy could be made fully critical only by recourse to the very metaphysical themes that Kant had apparently criticized. The story of the emergence of German Idealism has never been fully told. The story is full of tensions, contradictions, and reversals, all of which seemingly conspire to render a meaningful and unified account impossible. While defying any simple or simplistic explanation, the various and sometimes conflicting impulses that led to the emergence of German Idealism together constitute an intelligible and rich line of development. In this volume, an international group of leading scholars shows how the various aspirations at work in the emergence of German Idealism―moral, religious, aesthetic, political, and epistemological―can be understood as both consummating and overcoming Kant's critical philosophy. The volume also includes a chronology of the major works in the development of German Idealism, as well as a new translation of the seminal and still-controversial essay, "The Earliest System Programme of German Idealism."

The jumble of themes contained in Feuerbach’s Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit testify to the youthfulness of a work published when its author was a mere 26. These “thoughts” contain a scathing polemic against the veiled egoism of pietism and rationalism, an off-beat blend of Jacob Boehme’s theosophical mysticism with Lucretius’ arguments against personal immortality, and unique renditions of Hegel’s conceptions of nature, history, and God. There is even a somewhat tedious attempt to disprove the possibility of extraterrestial living beings! Yet these Todesgedanken were enormously significant in Feuerbach’s own life and intellectual development and in the development of Hegel’s philosophy after the latter’s death. The easy discovery of their authorship cost Feuerbach his academic career but they also helped him crystallize an idea of human beings’ true destiny which prompted his decision to become a writer. That destiny is death or, better, the genuine courage and love and earthly immortality that death alone makes possible. “True religion, true humility, true and complete surrender to and submersion in God is possible only when the human being recognizes death as true, real, and entire”. The appeal and importance of Feuerbach’s Todesgedanken lie in its impassioned, non-theist testimony to this speculative significance of death.

Kant's philosophical achievements have long overshadowed those of his German contemporaries, often to the point of concealing his contemporaries' influence upon him. This volume of new essays draws on recent research into the rich complexity of eighteenth-century German thought, examining key figures in the development of aesthetics and art history, the philosophy of history and education, political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. The essays range over numerous thinkers including Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Meyer, Winckelmann, Herder, Schiller, Hamann and Fichte, showing how they variously influenced, challenged, and revised Kant's philosophy, at times moving it in novel directions unacceptable to the magister himself. The volume will be valuable for all who are interested in this distinctive period of German philosophy.

Despite the importance that Heidegger assigns to affectivity structurally in Being and Time, accounts of the relevant sorts of affectivity are frequently and, in some cases, perhaps even egregiously missing from existential analyses that form the centerpiece of the work. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate as much. After recounting the considerable insights of Heidegger’s general account of disposedness and affectivity and the fundamental status he assigns to them, the focus of the chapter turns to the secondary status often accorded them in the first half of Being and Time and the seemingly crucial absence of an adequate account of the affective dimension of authentic existence, in the second half of the work. After making the argument that, according to Heidegger’s own criterion, the adequate rootedness of the existential analysis demands a more robust account of the affective character of existing authentically, the chapter concludes with an open question about the mood of undertaking the existential analysis itself.