Classical German Philosophy has traditionally been understood as the period in the history of ideas in which the investigation of the human mind takes precedence over the investigation of the natural world. This assessment has a twofold consequence. On the one hand, the philosophy of the period has been praised for its contributions to our understanding of multiple expressions of human rationality such as history, art, and religion. On the other hand, such a philosophy has been criticized for its obscure speculations alien to the standards of modern scientific cognition. The philosophy of nature developed at the time has been accordingly dismissed as a piece of outdated metaphysics. Challenging this view, the contributions collected in this book argue for the historical and contemporary relevance of the approaches to nature formulated at the time.

This volume gathers a collection of fourteen original articles discussing the concept of drive in classical German philosophy. Its aim is to offer a comprehensive historical overview of the concept of drive at the turn of the 19th century and to discuss it both historically and systematically. From the 18th century onward, the concept of drive started to play an important role in emerging disciplines such as biology, anthropology, and psychology. In these fields, the concept of drive was used to describe the inner forces of organic nature, or, more particularly, human urges and desires. But it was in the period of classical German philosophy that this concept developed into an important philosophical concept crucial to Kant’s and post-Kantian idealistic systems. Reflecting the complexity of this concept, the volume first discusses historical sources of drive theories in Leibniz, Reimarus, and Blumenbach. Afterwards, the volume presents the philosophical accounts of drives in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and also gives a systematic overview of other important drive theories that were formed around 1800 by Herder, Goethe, Jacobi, Novalis, Reinhold, Schiller, and Schopenhauer.

This book offers the first comprehensive exploration of the relevance of naturalism and theories of nature in Classical German Philosophy. It presents new readings from internationally renowned scholars on Kant, Jacobi, Goethe, the Romantic tradition, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Marx that highlight the significance of conceptions of nature and naturalism in Classical German Philosophy for contemporary concerns. The collection presents an inclusive view: it goes beyond the usual restricted focus on single thinkers to encompass the tradition as a whole, prompting dialogue among scholars interested in different authors and areas. It thus illuminates the post-Kantian tradition in a new, wider sense. The chapters also mobilize a productive perspective at the intersection of philosophy and history by combining careful textual and historical analysis with argument-based philosophizing. Overall, the book challenges the stereotypical view that Classical German Philosophy offers at best only an idealistic, one-sided, anachronistic, and theological view of nature. It invites readers to put traditional views in dialogue with current discussions of nature and naturalism. Nature and Naturalism in Classical German Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Classical German Philosophy, 19th-Century Philosophy, and contemporary perspectives on naturalism.

The Free Development of Each collects twelve essays on the history of German philosophy by Allen W. Wood, one of the leading scholars in the field. They explore moral philosophy, politics, society, and history in the works of Kant, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, and Marx, and share the basic theme of freedom, as it appears in morality and in politics. All of the essays have been re-edited and revised for this collection, and five are previously unpublished. They are accompanied by an Introduction which sets out the central, philosophical viewpoint of the volume, and a comprehensive bibliography.

Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century typically focus on its first half—when Hegel, idealism, and Romanticism dominated. By contrast, the remainder of the century, after Hegel's death, has been relatively neglected because it has been seen as a period of stagnation and decline. But Frederick Beiser argues that the second half of the century was in fact one of the most revolutionary periods in modern philosophy because the nature of philosophy itself was up for grabs and the very absence of certainty led to creativity and the start of a new era. In this innovative concise history of German philosophy from 1840 to 1900, Beiser focuses not on themes or individual thinkers but rather on the period’s five great debates: the identity crisis of philosophy, the materialism controversy, the methods and limits of history, the pessimism controversy, and the Ignorabimusstreit. Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Dilthey play important roles in these controversies but so do many neglected figures, including Ludwig Büchner, Eugen Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Fraunstaedt, Hermann Lotze, Adolf Trendelenburg, and two women, Agnes Taubert and Olga Pluemacher, who have been completely forgotten in histories of philosophy. The result is a wide-ranging, original, and surprising new account of German philosophy in the critical period between Hegel and the twentieth century.

Karen Ng sheds new light on Hegel's famously impenetrable philosophy. She does so by offering a new interpretation of Hegel's idealism and by foregrounding Hegel's Science of Logic, revealing that Hegel's theory of reason revolves around the concept of organic life. Beginning with the influence of Kant's Critique of Judgment on Hegel, Ng argues that Hegel's key philosophical contributions concerning self-consciousness, freedom, and logic all develop around the idea of internal purposiveness, which appealed to Hegel deeply. She charts the development of the purposiveness theme in Kant's third Critique, and argues that the most important innovation from that text is the claim that the purposiveness of nature opens up and enables the operation of the power of judgment. This innovation is essential for understanding Hegel's philosophical method in the Differenzschrift (1801) and Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where Hegel, developing lines of thought from Fichte and Schelling, argues against Kant that internal purposiveness constitutes cognition's activity, shaping its essential relation to both self and world. From there, Ng defends a new and detailed interpretation of Hegel's Science of Logic, arguing that Hegel's Subjective Logic can be understood as Hegel's version of a critique of judgment, in which life comes to be understood as opening up the possibility of intelligibility. She makes the case that Hegel's theory of judgment is modelled on reflective and teleological judgments, in which something's species or kind provides the objective context for predication. The Subjective Logic culminates in the argument that life is a primitive or original activity of judgment, one that is the necessary presupposition for the actualization of self-conscious cognition. Through bold and ambitious new arguments, Ng demonstrates the ongoing dialectic between life and self-conscious cognition, providing ground-breaking ways of understanding Hegel's philosophical system.

The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century is the first collective critical study of this important period in intellectual history. The volume is divided into four parts. The first part explores individual philosophers, including Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, amongst other great thinkers of the period. The second addresses key philosophical movements: Idealism, Romanticism, Neo-Kantianism, and Existentialism. The essays in the third part engage with different areas of philosophy that received particular attention at this time, including philosophy of nature, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of history, and hermeneutics. Finally, the contributors turn to discuss central philosophical topics, from skepticism to mat-erialism, from dialectics to ideas of historical and cultural Otherness, and from the reception of antiquity to atheism. Written by a team of leading experts, this Handbook will be an essential resource for anyone working in the area and will lead the direction of future research.

Figuring the Self consists of twelve essays which present, discuss, and assess the principal accounts of the self in classical German philosophy, focusing on the period around 1800 and covering Kant, Fichte, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.

`A very good idea, these Very Short Introductions, a new concept from OUP' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian --Book Jacket.

In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, published in Berlin, 1859, Karl Marx relates how the two of us in Brussels in the year 1845 set about: "to work out in common the opposition of our view" -- the materialist conception of history which was elaborated mainly by Marx -- "to the ideological view of German philosophy, in fact, to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience. The resolve was carried out in the form of a criticism of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript, two large octavo volumes, had long reached its place of publication in Westphalia when we received the news that altered circumstances did not allow of its being printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose -- self-clarification!" Since then more than 40 years have elapsed and Marx died without either of us having had an opportunity of returning to the subject. We have expressed ourselves in various places regarding our relation to Hegel, but nowhere in a comprehensive, connected account. To Feuerbach, who after all in many respects forms an intermediate link between Hegelian philosophy and our conception, we never returned.