Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche

by Paul Redding

Overview

Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess philosophers after him in light of their responses to Kantian idealism. In Continental Idealism, Paul Redding argues that the story of German idealism begins with Leibniz.

Redding begins by examining Leibniz's dispute with Newton over the nature of space, time and God, and stresses the way in which Leibniz incorporated Platonic and Aristotelian elements in his distinctive brand of idealism. Redding shows how Kant's interpretation of Leibniz's views of space and time consequently shaped his own 'transcendental' version of idealism. Far from ending here, however, Redding argues that post-Kantian idealists such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel on the one hand and metaphysical sceptics such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the other continued to wrestle with a form of idealism ultimately derived from Leibniz.

Continental Idealism offers not only a new picture of one of the most important philosophical movements in the history of philosophy, but also a valuable and clear introduction to the origins of Continental and European philosophy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415443074
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/30/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction 1

1 The Seventeenth-Century Background to the Emergence of Continental Idealism 6

1.1 Early-modern theology and natural philosophy 6

1.2 Henry More and Newtonian "spiritualism" 9

1.3 Leibniz, Clarke and Berkeley on space and God 12

2 The Monadological World of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 20

2.1 Leibniz's .monadological world 20

2.2 Leibniz, the new physics, and the divine orderliness of the universe 22

2.3 Leibniz's conception of the moral order 25

2.4 The monadological conception of the soul and its capacities 28

2.5 Leibniz and mystico-religious Neoplatonism 32

3 Kant's Development from Physical to Moral Monadologist 36

3.1 Kant's pre-critical physical monadology and the mind-body problem 37

3.2 The role of Swedenborg in the transformation of Kant's pre-critical thought 39

3.3 The role of Leibniz in the transformation of Kant's pre-critical thought 40

3.4 The role of Rousseau in the transformation of Kant's pre-critical thought 43

3.5 Kant's "semi-transcendental turn" in the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 44

4 Kant and the "Copernican" Conception of Transcendental Philosophy 52

4.1 The Copernican reversal of perspective and its consequences for metaphysics 54

4.2 The aporia of traditional metaphysics 59

4.3 Kant's modernism 61

4.4 Kant on Aristotle's "categories" and Plato's "ideas" 63

4.5 Kant's "Plato" 66

5 The Moral Framework of Metaphysics 70

5.1 The primacy of practical reason in Kant's critical philosophy 73

5.2 The object of "pure practical reason"-the moral law-can only be grounded in the form, rather than the empirical content, of the will 76

5.3 Kant's political theory 80

5.4 Concerns with Kant's practical philosophy 83

6 The Later Kant as a "Post-Kantian" Philosopher? 88

6.1 From empirical to transcendental accounts of Hutchesonian moral sense 88

6.2 The ethical infrastructure of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment 90

6.3 The symbolic dimension of beauty 95

6.4 The teleology of the world considered as a whole 97

7 Jena Post-Kantianism: Reinhold and Fichte 103

7.1 Reinhold's "proposition of consciousness" and Schulze's critique 103

7.2 Fichte's reconceptualizing of the mind as self-positing process 106

7.3 Fichte's project of the Wissenschaftslehre 108

7.4 Intersubjective recognition as a condition of self-consciousness 113

8 The Jena Romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling 116

8.1 Friedrich Schlegel: Transcendental poetry and the unpresentable absolute 118

8.2 Schlegel and the critique of foundationalism 122

8.3 Schelling and Plato's world soul 125

8.4 Schelling's philosophy of nature 127

8.5 Art and mythology 131

9 Hegel's Idealist Metaphysics of Spirit 135

9.1 The puzzle of Hegel's attitude to religion and metaphysics 136

9.2 Hegel's critique of Kant's idea of God 138

9.3 The project of a "phenomenology of spirit" 140

9.4 Self-negating shapes of consciousness 143

9.5 Self-consciousness and the recognitive theory of spirit 146

9.6 Phenomenology, logic and metaphysics 150

10 Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the Ambiguous End of the Idealist Tradition 155

10.1 Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the will 156

10.2 The task of transcending the will: Morality and art 158

10.3 Schopenhauer and Fichte's transcendental idealism 160

10.4 The early Nietzsche: Schopenhauer, Wagner and The Birth of Tragedy 162

10.5 The later Nietzsche: Life after the deaths of tragedy and God 165

Postscript: Idealism after the End of (Its) History 175

Notes 180

Bibliography 204

Index 221

Editorial Reviews

Paul Redding’s Continental Idealism is a lucid account of the development of German philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a contribution to current philosophical debates. Its originality lies in stressing the foundational importance of Leibniz, and in offering clear and compelling explanations of the different kinds of metaphysical commitments within idealist philosophy. Redding casts new light on the relation of Hegel to Kant and Fichte, situates the German Romantics in this body of thought, and traces the subversion of these traditions in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Redding is also attentive to contemporary philosophical issues, arguing that idealism, properly understood, remains viable as an alternative to the reductive naturalism that characterises much current thinking. – Douglas Moggach, University of Ottawa

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