Schelling’s Attempt at Restoration: Idealism Under Review

Schelling’s Development after 1809: The Middle Period

Schelling hasn’t been publishing since 1809, after return to school in 1840s, Schelling started with the motivation: Given the problems in Kant’s own views, what would it take to “complete” the Kantian philosophy in spirit, if not in letter.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: post-Kantian in a new vein

Hegel’s Journey

The guiding question behind Hegel’s work is: what would a modern religion look like, and was it possible to have a modern religion that would satisfy our needs in the way that classical religions seemed to have satisfied the needs of the ancients? The need to satisfy is the need to be free in a Kantian and post-Kantian sense, what would it take to be able to lead one’s own life, to have a life of one’s own, to be autonomous, self-legislating?

The 1780s: The Immediate post-Kantian reaction: Jacobi and Reinhold

The Critique of Reason turned against Kant: Jacobi

Jacobi thought that faith in reason to solve all of life’s problems was misplaced. Jacobi concluded that all our knowledge must rest on some kind of faith since any demonstration requires some principles from which it can be demonstrated, and that requires a stopping point, a set of principles that cannot be proved, and can only be accepted by faith.

Human Spontaneity and the Natural Order (Critique of Pure Reason)

Kant transformed the landscape of philosophy by introducing his theory of transcendental idealism. His theory addresses the problems raised by both rationalists and empiricists about the relationship between knowledge and the object of knowledge, or, how do we have necessary and universal knowledge about the external world if all we can think of is our ideas. Rationalists starts with innate ideas (concept) and tries to derive knowledge with the ideas and make judgments about things even outside of empirical realm, like the immortality of the soul and existence of God. Empiricists starts with sense perceptions (intuition), and claims that the knowledge is abstracted from the sense perceptions, however, it cannot address Hume’s doubt that causality is just our mental habit and bears no real significance in the real world.

I plan to read a bit more on german idealism before diving into Hegel. The two commonly recommended books in reddit are Frederick C. Beiser’s German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801 and Pinkard’s German Philosophy 1760-1860.