School · 25 thinkers

German Idealism & Its Heirs

25 thinkers of German Idealism & Its Heirs on the Agora star map, from Immanuel Kant to Emil Lask, in chronological order.

• 1724–1804Immanuel Kant

  For Kant, we can only know the world as it appears to us – and morality comes from reason, not from feelings or rewards.

• 1743–1819Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

  Any philosophy that follows reason all the way ends up denying freedom and God, so only a leap of faith can save them.

• 1744–1803Johann Gottfried Herder

  Every people and every age has its own language, culture and worth, and none should be judged by the standards of another.

• 1762–1814Johann Gottlieb Fichte

  For Fichte, the self is not a thing but an act: it creates itself through its own activity, and the world is the resistance it needs for freedom.

• 1768–1834Friedrich Schleiermacher

  Religion is not doctrine or morality but a feeling of total dependence on something greater – and understanding any text means reliving its author’s mind.

• 1770–1831Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  For Hegel, truth is the whole: history, thought and society develop through conflicts and their resolution, toward ever greater freedom and self-awareness.

• 1770–1843Friedrich Hölderlin

  Before every judgment that divides subject from object there is an original unity of being, which only poetry can still approach.

• 1772–1801Novalis

  The world should be romanticised – the ordinary given a deeper meaning and the finite a glimpse of the infinite.

• 1772–1829Friedrich Schlegel

  Poetry should mix all forms and never be finished, and irony lets the mind float freely above its own creations.

• 1775–1854Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

  Nature and mind are two sides of one reality – nature is mind made visible – and human freedom includes the real possibility of evil.

• 1783–1872N. F. S. Grundtvig

  Education for life comes not from dead letters and Latin learning but from the living word in the mother tongue, joined to the people’s history and poetry; a folk high school open to all should awaken young adults as free citizens – human first, then Christian.

• 1797–1855Antonio Rosmini

  Every act of knowing presupposes one idea not drawn from the senses, the idea of being, which the mind intuits by nature; the human person, as the bearer of this light, is itself subsistent right.

• 1802–1872Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg

  Trendelenburg held that motion is the fundamental fact common to thought and being, and he used an Aristotelian logic to deny Hegel’s claim that dialectic is an absolute method.

• 1806–1881J. V. Snellman

  A people becomes a nation, and its state becomes real, only when its spirit grows conscious of itself in its own language, literature and education; for Finland this meant that Finnish, the language of the majority, had to become a language of culture and government.

• 1814–1894August Cieszkowski

  Hegel understood history only up to the present; but the future too can be known, and philosophy must pass into the deed, so that the coming age becomes an age of conscious action.

• 1817–1881Hermann Lotze

  Lotze held that the validity of a thought is distinct from the mental events in which it occurs, and that the world rests on the good, a value that materialism cannot derive from facts about nature.

• 1824–1907Kuno Fischer

  Fischer held that the history of modern philosophy from Descartes to Schopenhauer is one connected, dialectical development rather than a row of separate systems; Trendelenburg contested his reading of Kant’s doctrine of space.

• 1828–1875Friedrich Albert Lange

  Lange held that materialism is a sound method of natural science but fails as a worldview, since the physiology of the senses shows that we know only appearances – a Kantian conclusion reached from science.

• 1842–1918Hermann Cohen

  Cohen held that philosophy must start from the fact of science and ask for the conditions of its validity; pure thought produces its objects from an origin. Ethics demands treating every person as an end, hence ethical socialism, and the one God of Judaism grounds a religion of reason.

• 1848–1915Wilhelm Windelband

  Windelband held that the sciences differ by their aim rather than their objects: the natural sciences seek general laws, the historical sciences describe singular events, and philosophy is the critical science of the values that claim validity for everyone.

• 1854–1924Paul Natorp

  Natorp held that philosophy is the critique of the conditions of scientific knowledge, and he read Plato’s Ideas as hypotheses of such a method rather than as separate beings.

• 1863–1936Heinrich Rickert

  For Rickert, the natural sciences form general concepts and laws, while history and the cultural sciences form concepts of singular things by selecting what is essential through its relation to values – so the human sciences rest on a logic of their own, not on psychology.

• 1866–1952Benedetto Croce

  Reality is spirit in four distinct forms – the beautiful, the true, the useful and the good; art is intuition that is already expression, and all true history is contemporary history, the story of liberty.

• 1875–1944Giovanni Gentile

  For Gentile, nothing exists outside the living act of thinking, in which subject and object, individual and community are produced together; to educate is for spirit to form itself, and the state is this ethical will within each person, not an external power – the doctrine of the ‘ethical state’ that he put at the service of Fascism.

• 1875–1915Emil Lask

  Lask held that philosophy is the science of validity, and that its central problem is how the irrational given of experience can be grasped in concepts without being dissolved into them.

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