Metaphysik (German Edition)

The majority of research literature, compendiums and histories of philosophy argues within this frame. A closer look at the facts reveals that this conviction has no basis in the text. Quite the contrary it is based on a reception with theological interests. It arised over centuries, starting from Patristic times and the Middle Ages; it was influenced by Neoplatonic texts as the Liber de Causis or the Theologia Aristotelis, texts for a long time considered as original Aristotelian books. And, if you read not translations but the Greek text, you see that the word 'god' occurs much less than in a theological book should be.

In some translations we find more occurences of that word, and especially in French, Italian, English translations some words as le Bien, l'Intelligence etc. To make it even more clear, we read often the term 'First Mover' or 'Unmoved Mover' as an other name for god, but this expression is never used by Aristotle. So the reader has the impression that Aristotle speaks continuously about god.

In the present book you will find arguments which clean up with the outdated concept of substance in the Aristotelian text, a concept which was developed for quite other problems than Aristotle had, namely theolgical ones. And, if there is no substance, there is no corresponding metaphysics of substance and no theology or onto-theology. If substance, metyphysics, theology play no role in Metaphysics Lambda, what else is its content and aim? The present text in German is a slightly corrected version of the book published by the Lang Verlag, Bern.

Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were, again, more radical. Inspired by Karl Leonhard Reinhold, they attempted to derive all the different parts of philosophy from a single, first principle. This first principle came to be known as the absolute, because the absolute, or unconditional, must precede all the principles which are conditioned by the difference between one principle and another. Although German idealism is closely related to developments in the intellectual history of Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as classicism and romanticism, it is also closely related to larger developments in the history of modern philosophy.

Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel sought to overcome the division between rationalism and empiricism that had emerged during the early modern period. The way they characterized these tendencies has exerted a lasting influence on the historiography of modern philosophy.

Although German idealism itself has been subject to periods of neglect in the last two hundred years, renewed interest in the contributions of the German idealism have made it an important resource for contemporary philosophy. Kant insisted that this reading misrepresented his position. While the dogmatic idealist denies the reality of space and time, Kant takes space and time to be forms of intuition. Forms of intuition are, for Kant, the subjective conditions of the possibility of all of our sense perception. It is only because space and time are a priori forms that determine the content of our sensations that Kant thinks we can perceive anything at all.

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It certainly does not imply that space and time are unreal or that the understanding produces the objects of our cognition by itself. Unfortunately, the endorsements Kant hoped for never arrived. Mendelssohn, in particular, was preoccupied with concerns about his health and the dispute that had arisen between himself and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi about the alleged Spinozism of his friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing During the controversy, Jacobi charged that any attempt to demonstrate philosophical truths was fatally flawed.

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Jacobi concluded that transcendental idealism, like Spinozism, subordinates the immediate certainty, or faith, through which we know the world, to demonstrative reason, transforming reality into an illusion. Jacobi remained a thorn in the side of the Kantians and the young German idealists, but he was unable to staunch interest in philosophy in general or idealism in particular. In later years, Fichte presented a number of substantially different versions of the Wissenschaftslehre in lectures in Berlin.

When, as a result of a controversy concerning his religious views, Fichte left Jena in , Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling became the most important idealist in Jena. Schelling had also established close relationships with the Jena romantics, who, despite their great interest in Kant, Reinhold, and Fichte, maintained a more skeptical attitude towards philosophy than the German idealists.

Although Hegel only published three more books during his lifetime, Science of Logic , Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences , and Elements of the Philosophy of Right , he remains the most widely-read and most influential of the German idealists.

The German idealists have acquired a reputation for obscurity, because of the length and complexity of many of their works. As a consequence, they are often considered to be obscurantists and irrationalists. The German idealists were, however, neither obscurantists nor irrationalists. Their contributions to logic are earnest attempts to formulate a modern logic that is consistent with the idealism of their metaphysics and epistemology.

Kant was the first of the German idealists to make important contributions to logic. Transcendental logic also differs from general logic because it does not abstract from the content of cognition. Transcendental logic contains the laws of pure thinking as they pertain to the cognition of objects. This does not mean that transcendental logic is concerned with empirical objects as such, but rather with the a priori conditions of the possibility of the cognition of objects.

Reinhold insisted that the laws of general logic had to be derived from the principle of consciousness if philosophy was to become systematic and scientific, but the possibility of this derivation was contested by Schulze in Aenesidemus. Because the principle of consciousness has to be consistent with basic logical principles like the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of the excluded middle, Schulze concluded that it could not be regarded as a first principle. The laws of general logic were, it seemed, prior to the principle of consciousness, so that even the Elementarphilosophie presupposed general logic.

Logical analysis is always undertaken reflectively, according to Fichte, because it presupposes that consciousness has already been determined in some way. Because Hegel was convinced that truth is both formal and material, and not one or the other, he sought to establish the dialectical unity of the formal and the material in his works on logic. For Hegel, however, this process accounts for the genesis of the categories and concepts through which all cognition is determined. Logic reveals the unity of that process. German idealism is a form of idealism.

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The idealism espoused by the German idealists is, however, different from other kinds of idealism with which contemporary philosophers may be more familiar. While earlier idealists maintained that reality is ultimately intellectual rather than material Plato or that the existence of objects is mind-dependent Berkeley , the German idealists reject the distinctions these views presuppose. Kant holds that the objects of human cognition are transcendentally ideal and empirically real. They are transcendentally ideal, because the conditions of the cognition human beings have of objects are to be found in the cognitive faculties of human beings.

This does not mean the existence of those objects is mind-dependent, because Kant thinks we can only know objects to the extent that they are objects for us and, thus, as they appear to us. Idealism with respect to appearances does not entail the mind-dependence of objects, because it does not commit itself to any claims about the nature of things in themselves. Kant denies that we have any knowledge of things in themselves, because we do not have the capacity to make judgments about the nature of things in themselves based on our knowledge of things as they appear.

Despite our ignorance of things in themselves, Kant thought we could have objectively valid cognition of empirically real objects. Kant recognized that we are affected by things outside ourselves and that this affection produces sensations. The synthesis of matter and form in judgment therefore produces objectively valid cognition of empirically real objects. Fichte, however, maintains the very idea of a thing in itself, a thing which is not an object for us and which exists independently of our consciousness, is a contradiction in terms.

There can be no thing in itself, Fichte claims, because a thing is only a thing when it is something for us.

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