Category: German Idealism
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Kant and the Claims of Taste
Kant and the Claims of Taste, here published in a revised version, has become since its initial publication in 1979 the standard commentary on Kant’s aesthetic theory. The book offers a detailed account of Kant’s views on judgments of taste, aesthetic pleasure, imagination and many other topics. For this new edition, Paul Guyer has provided […]
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Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary
Henry E. Allison presents a comprehensive commentary on Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). It differs from most recent commentaries in paying special attention to the structure of the work, the historical context in which it was written, and the views to which Kant was responding. Allison argues that, despite its relative brevity, the Groundwork is the […]
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Hegel: A Re-Examination
First published in 2002. Written in 1958, this book offers a re-examination of Hegel’s work, and is the volume I of a series of seven volumes on his work. Starting with a biography and the key ideas, the author offers his own explanations of ideas that are central in Hegel: being the notion of spirit, […]
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The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction
Kant declared that philosophy began in 1781 with his Critique of Pure Reason. In 1806 Hegel announced that philosophy had now been completed. Eckart Förster examines the reasons behind these claims and assesses the steps that led in such a short time from Kant’s “beginning” to Hegel’s “end.” He concludes that, in an unexpected yet significant sense, […]
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Hegelian Metaphysics
The great German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel has exerted an immense influence on the development of philosophy from the early 19th century to the present. But the metaphysical aspects of his thought are still under-appreciated. In a series of essays Robert Stern traces the development of a distinctively Hegelian approach to metaphysics and […]
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Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism: Answering the Question of Justification
Robert Stern investigates how scepticism can be countered by using transcendental arguments concerning the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience, language, or thought. He shows that the most damaging sceptical questions concern neither the certainty of our beliefs, nor the reliability of our belief-forming methods, but rather whether we can justify our beliefs in […]
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Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard
In many histories of modern ethics, Kant is supposed to have ushered in an anti-realist or constructivist turn by holding that unless we ourselves ‘author’ or lay down moral norms and values for ourselves, our autonomy as agents will be threatened. In this book, Robert Stern challenges the cogency of this ‘argument from autonomy’, and […]
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Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, an influence each new thinker struggles to escape. As a consequence, Hegel’s absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the defining philosopher of the historical transition to modernity, a period with which our own […]
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The Philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling: History, System, and Freedom
The figure of Schelling, prince of the romantics, has been too long overshadowed by that of Hegel, no doubt for more than one historical or doctrinal reason. If the three fellow students at the Tubingen seminary—Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling—swore eternal loyalty to the great ideal of the French revolution, freedom, the remainder of their intellectual […]
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The Anti-Romantic: Hegel Against Ironic Romanticism
Hegel’s critique of Early German Romanticism and its theory of irony resonates to the core of his own philosophy in the same way that Plato’s polemics with the Sophists have repercussions that go to the centre of his thought. The Anti-Romantic examines Hegel’s critique of Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and Schleiermacher. Hegel rarely mentions these thinkers by name […]
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Hegel and the Challenge of Spinoza: A Study in German Idealism, 1801–1831
Hegel and the Challenge of Spinoza explores the powerful continuing influence of Spinoza’s metaphysical thinking in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German philosophy. George di Giovanni examines the ways in which Hegel’s own metaphysics sought to meet the challenges posed by Spinoza’s monism, not by disproving monism, but by rendering it moot. In this, di […]
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The Problem of Nature in Hegel’s Final System
Wes Furlotte critically evaluates Hegel’s philosophy of human freedom in terms of his often-disregarded conception of nature. In doing so, he gives us a new portrait of Hegel’s final system that is surprisingly relevant for our contemporary world, connecting it with recent work in speculative realism and new materialism. Furlotte offers a sophisticated sense of […]
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Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology
If Kant had never made the “critical turn” of 1773, would he be worth more than a paragraph in the history of philosophy? Most scholars think not. But in this pioneering book, John H. Zammito challenges that view by revealing a precritical Kant who was immensely more influential than the one philosophers think they know. […]
Simon Gros 