The aim of this Topics Seminar is for the participating student (1) to become familiar with positions taken in the current debates over the specific topic area of the course; (2) to appreciate the arguments for and against the positions; and (3) to develop an independent judgment about the most promising approach in this area. Specifically the course aims to provide:
- General overview over key thinkers and themes from the period of German Idealism
- Advanced understanding of the problem of freedom as developed and discussed by philosophers from this period
- Contextualization of the philosophical discussions of this period
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This course is devoted to a key moment in the history of philosophy, the period of “German idealism” – i.e. the developments that were initiated by Kant, and by the attempts to constructively build forth upon Kant’s ideas, as developed by, among others, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In recent years, the label “German Idealism” has fallen into discredit, and has been replaced by the more open term “Classical German philosophy” – indicating that philosophy in this period, and in particular the reactions upon Kant’s philosophy, have been much broader in content than the label “idealism” indicates.
The present course takes up the challenge that lies in this terminological development. We’ll look into the (highly polemical, and thus also very entertaining) debate about the merits (or shortcomings!) of an “idealism” in this period. Texts will include Kant’s “refutation of idealism” in his Critique of Pure Reason and the review that stimulated Kant to write this “refutation”; Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s announcement of a novel form of “realism”, and Fichte’s and Schelling’s projects for integrating idealist and realist elements in their philosophy. Investigating links to today’s debates about realism and anti-realism will be actively encouraged.
A reader with the relevant texts (in English translation) will be made available, together with additional materials form my current research project on realism and empiricism around 1800.
Introductory reading:
Zöller, Günter (2000). German Realism: The self-limitation of idealist thinking in Fichte, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. In Karl Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Cambridge University Press. pp. 200--218.
Beiser, Frederick (2002). German Idealism. The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 Cambridge, Mass. / London: Harvard UP.
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