The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Read online

  THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

  GERMAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

  THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

  GERMAN PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

  Edited by

  MICHAEL N. FORSTER

  and

  KRISTIN GJESDAL

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

  United Kingdom

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

  © The several contributors 2015

  The moral rights of the authors‌ have been asserted

  First Edition published in 2015

  Impression: 1

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014946221

  ISBN 978–0–19–969654–3

  eISBN 978–0–19–969654–3

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  CONTENTS

  List of Contributors

  Introduction

  PHILOSOPHERS

  1. Fichte (1762–1814)

  GÜNTER ZÖLLER

  2. Schleiermacher (1768–1834)

  ANDREAS ARNDT

  3. Hegel (1770–1831)

  PAUL REDDING

  4. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)

  DALIA NASSAR

  5. Schelling (1775–1854)

  MARKUS GABRIEL

  6. Schopenhauer (1788–1860)

  SEBASTIAN GARDNER

  7. Kierkegaard (1813–1855)

  MICHELLE KOSCH

  8. Marx (1818–1883)

  MICHAEL QUANTE

  9. Dilthey (1833–1911)

  RUDOLF A. MAKKREEL

  10. Nietzsche (1844–1900)

  BRIAN LEITER

  11. Frege (1848–1925)

  PATRICIA A. BLANCHETTE

  PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS

  12. Idealism

  TERRY PINKARD

  13. Romanticism

  FRED RUSH

  14. Neo-Kantianism

  FREDERICK BEISER

  15. Existentialism

  KATIA HAY

  AREAS OF PHILOSOPHY

  16. Philosophy of Nature

  ALISON STONE

  17. Philosophy of Science

  FREDERICK GREGORY

  18. Philosophy of Mind

  BARBARA GAIL MONTERO

  19. Philosophy of Language

  HANS-JOHANN GLOCK

  20. Nineteenth-Century German Logic

  GRAHAM PRIEST

  21. Hermeneutics

  ANDREW BOWIE

  22. Philosophy of History

  SALLY SEDGWICK

  23. Education

  LINA STEINER

  24. Ethics

  PAUL KATSAFANAS

  25. Aesthetics

  PAUL GUYER

  26. Political Philosophy

  JEAN-FRANÇOIS KERVÉGAN

  27. Feminism

  JANE KNELLER

  PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS

  28. Skepticism and Epistemology

  ULRICH SCHLÖSSER

  29. Metaphysics and Critique of Metaphysics

  PIRMIN STEKELER-WEITHOFER

  30. Methodology of the Sciences

  LYDIA PATTON

  31. Materialism

  KURT BAYERTZ

  32. Perspectivism

  SONGSUK SUSAN HAHN

  33. Dialectics

  CLAUDIA WIRSING

  34. Evolution

  CHRISTIAN SPAHN

  35. Bildung

  KRISTIN GJESDAL

  36. Receptions of Eastern Thought

  DOUGLAS L. BERGER

  37. The Other

  MICHAEL MACK

  38. The Burden of Antiquity

  JESSICA N. BERRY

  39. Historicism

  JOHN H. ZAMMITO

  40. Ideology

  MICHAEL N. FORSTER

  41. Atheism

  TODD GOOCH

  Index

  LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

  Andreas Arndt is Professor (chair) of Philosophy at the Faculty of Theology of the Humboldt-University, Berlin, and Director and Research-Coordinator of the Schleiermacher-Research-Center at Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Born in 1949 in Wilhelmshaven (Lower Saxony), he studied Philosophy and German literature in Freiburg i.Br., Bochum, and Bielefeld; MA Bochum 1974, PhD Bielefeld 1979, habilitation at the Free University Berlin 1987, from 1987 to 2011 Associated Professor (Privatdozent) resp. Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Free University; Research Assistant at the Schleiermacher-Research-Center from 1979 to 2011. President of the International Hegel Society from 1992 to present. His latest book-publications include Die Klassische Deutsche Philosophie nach Kant (with Walter Jaeschke, C. H. Beck, 2012) and Friedrich Schleiermacher als Philosoph (Walter de Gruyter, 2013).

  Kurt Bayertz studied Philosophy, German Literature, and Social Siences. Since 1993 he is Professor for Philosophy at the University of Münster (Germany). His main fields of interest are: ethics, anthropology, and selected parts of the history of philosophy (among them materialism). His books include: GenEthics. Technological Intervention in Human Reproduction as a Philosophical Problem (Cambridge University Press 1994. (ed.)), Solidarity (Kluwer Academic Publishers 1999), Warum überhaupt moralisch sein? (C. H. Beck 2004), and Der aufrechte Gang. Eine Geschichte des anthropologischen Denkens (C. H. Beck 2012).

  Frederick Beiser was born and raised in the US but received his education in the UK at Oriel College (BA) and Wolfson College (DPhil), Oxford. He immigrated to West Germany in 1980, where from 1980 to 1984 he spent most of his time writing in his Hinterhof. Subsequently, he wandered around the US, teaching at seven universities: Penn, Indiana, Yale, Wisconsin, Colorado, Harvard, and Syracuse. He has currently settled in Syracuse where he cultivates his garden. Recently, he has written two books on nineteenth-century philosophy: The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Late German Idealism (Oxford University Press, 2013). He has recently finished a manuscript entitled The Origins and Genesis of Neo-Kantianism.

  Douglas L. Berger is Associate Professor of Indian and Chinese Philosophical Traditions and Cross-Cultural Hermeneutics at the Philosophy Department of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is also the President of the Society of Asian and Comparative Philosophy and the General Editor of the University of Hawai’i book series Dimensions of Asian Spirituality. Berger, the author of numerous essays and book chapters on Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist philosophers, has al
so done extensive research on Schopenhauer’s appropriation of early Indian ideas, represented in his 2004 book “The Veil of Māyā:” Schopenhauer’s System and Early Indian Thought (Global Academic Publications/SUNY).

  Jessica N. Berry is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she works on late eighteenth- to early twentieth-century German philosophy (especially issues in epistemology and value theory in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche) and in ancient Greek philosophy (especially the pre-Socratic and Hellenistic philosophers). Her book Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2011), finished with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, brings together and expands upon work she has published in Philosophical Topics, The Journal of the History of Ideas, International Studies in Philosophy, and elsewhere.

  Patricia A. Blanchette is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Frege’s Conception of Logic (Oxford University Press 2012), as well as a number of articles on Frege, on the philosophy of logic and mathematics, and on the history of analytic philosophy.

  Andrew Bowie is Professor of Philosophy and German at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include: Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester University Press, 1990, 20032); Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (Routledge, 1993); (ed. and trans.) F.W.J. von Schelling,‘On the History of Modern Philosophy’ (Cambridge University Press, 1994); From Romanticism to Critical Theory. The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (Routledge 1997); (ed.) Manfred Frank, The Subject and the Text (Cambridge University Press, 1997); (ed. and trans.) F.D.E Schleiermacher. ‘Hermeneutics and Criticism’ and Other Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Introduction to German Philosophy from Kant to Habermas (Polity Press, 2004); Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2007), German Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010), Philosophical Variations: Music as Philosophical Language (Aarhus U.P.); Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy (Polity Press, 2013), many articles. He is also a jazz saxophonist.

  Michael N. Forster is currently Alexander von Humboldt Professor, holder of the Chair in Theoretical Philosophy, and Co-director of the International Centre for Philosophy at Bonn University. He taught for twenty-eight years at the University of Chicago, where he served for ten years as chairman of the Philosophy Department and was Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor. His historical work is on ancient philosophy and especially German philosophy, his systematic work mainly on epistemology and philosophy of language. He has published numerous articles and seven books.

  Markus Gabriel is the Chair for Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy and Co-director of the International Centre for Philosophy at the University of Bonn. Author of ten books and over fifty scholarly articles, Professor Gabriel’s most well-known works in the English-speaking world are Mythology, Madness and Laughter, written together with Slavoj Žižek, and Transcendental Ontology: Essays on German Idealism; and a translation of his Habilitation, Skepticism and Idealism in Ancient Philosophy is forthcoming. His main works on Schelling are Der Mensch im Mythos and Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitschrift.

  Sebastian Gardner is Professor of Philosophy at University College London. He has published books and articles on the philosophy of psychoanalysis, Kant, German Idealism, Nietzsche, and Sartre.

  Kristin Gjesdal is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. She works in the areas of German Idealism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. Her work has appeared in journals such as Kant-Studien, Hegel-Studien, Journal of the History of Philosophy, History of Philosophy Quarterly, and British Journal of the History of Philosophy. Her book Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009.

  Hans-Johann Glock is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Zurich. He is also Visiting Professor at the University of Reading. His research interests are in the fields of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and analytic philosophy more broadly. Glock has worked in particular with the topic of concepts and also on the question of animal cognition.

  Todd Gooch is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Eastern Kentucky University. His research interests are located at the intersection of philosophy, religious studies, and modern European intellectual history. He is the author of The Numinous and Modernity: An Interpretation of Rudolf Otto’s Philosophy of Religion and an entry on Ludwig Feuerbach in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He has also published or has forthcoming articles and book chapters on philosophical issues in the works of Otto, Max Scheler, Hegel, the Young Hegelians, and J. S. Mill.

  Frederick Gregory is Emeritus Professor of History of Science at the University of Florida and past president of the History of Science Society. His research focuses on German science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly as it relates to the philosophical and religious developments of the time. Among his major works are Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Springer, 1977) and Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1993). He edited the English translation of Jakob Fries’s Knowledge, Belief, and Aesthetic Sense (Dinter Verlag, 1989) and his two-volume text, Natural Science in Western History, appeared in 2007 (Houghton-Mifflin Publishing Co.).

  Paul Guyer is the Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Brown University, and Florence R. C. Murray Professor in the Humanities emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, editor, or translator of more than twenty volumes on the philosophy of Kant and on aesthetics. His A History of Modern Aesthetics in three volumes appeared in 2014. He is a past president of the American Society for Aesthetics and of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. He is a Research Prize Winner of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  Songsuk Susan Hahn works mainly in nineteenth-century philosophy, particularly on problems about moral agency in connection with freedom, and problems in aesthetics that elude purely rational, discursive thought. She received her PhD from Columbia University and is the author of Contradiction in Motion: Hegel’s Organic Concept of Life and Value (Cornell University Press, 2007). Her current book project is entitled Nature Loves to Hide: Natural Norms in the Skeptical Tradition. The book investigates how skeptical doubts have motivated a naturalistic grounding of values in a range of authors, from Hume to Nietzsche, who are responding to practical problems about whether skeptics can live their skepticism. The book argues that their naturalism ought not to be regarded as an antidote to neutralize the threat of skepticism, but as originating out of their skeptical doubts. She recently co-edited with Allen Wood, The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy [1790–1870] (Cambridge University Press, 2012). She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Wesleyan University.

  Katia Hay studied philosophy and literature at the University Complutense in Madrid, and continued her studies in Paris, receiving her DEA (Diplome d´Etudes Approfondis) on Deleuze in 2004. She wrote her PhD dissertation on Schelling and the tragic at the universities of Munich (LMU) and Paris (Sorbonne, Paris IV) and received a double PhD summa cum laude in 2008. Her dissertation Die Notwendigkeit des Scheiterns. Das Tragische als Bestimmung der Philosophie bei Schelling has recently been published in the series Beiträge zur Schelling-Forschung (Alber, 2012). She has published numerous articles and book chapters and taught widely at the New School, Lisbon, Freiburg, and Chile. She’s a member of the Centro de Filosofia of the University of Lisbon and currently holds a post-doc position (FCT) at the University of Lisbon.

  Paul Katsafanas is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. He works on ethics, agency, and nineteenth-century philosophy. His recent publications include Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism (Oxford University Press, 2013), “Nietzsche and Kant on
the Will: Two Models of Reflective Agency” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming), and “The Concept of Unified Agency in Nietzsche, Plato, and Schiller” (Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2011).

  Jean-François Kervégan studied philosophy in Paris. Having been a researcher in the National Centre for Scientific Research (France) and in the Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte (Frankfurt, Germany), then Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Cergy-Pontoise (France), he is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University Paris 1 (Sorbonne) and senior Fellow of the ‘Institut Universitaire de France’. His work concerns German philosophy and the philosophy of law. He translated Hegel’s Principles of the Philosophy of Right into French. Last books (selection): Que faire de Carl Schmitt? (Gallimard, 2011); L’effectif et le rationnel. Hegel et l’esprit objectif (Vrin, 2008); (ed.) Hegel au présent. Une relève de la métaphysique? (CNRS, 2012).

  Jane Kneller is Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. Her research and scholarship focuses on Kant, especially Kant’s aesthetics and social theory, and also the philosophy of early German romanticism. Major publications include Kant and the Power of Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Novalis: Fichte Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and numerous articles and book chapters on Kantian and early German romantic aesthetics and social theory.

  Michelle Kosch is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. She is the author of Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard (Oxford University Press, 2006) and articles on Kierkegaard, Fichte, Schelling, Kant, and Foucault. She is currently working on a book on Fichte’s ethics.

  Brian Leiter is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002) and Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton University Press, 2013), and co-editor of Nietzsche (Oxford Readings in Philosophy, 2001), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2007), and Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford University Press, 2007). His many articles on Nietzsche have appeared in Ethics, Philosopher’s Imprint, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, European Journal of Philosophy, and elsewhere.