German philosophy, here taken to mean either
(1) philosophy in the German language or (2)
philosophy by Germans, has been extremely
diverse, and central to both the analytic
and continental traditions in philosophy for
centuries, from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
through Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein
to contemporary philosophers.
Søren Kierkegaard (a Danish philosopher)
is frequently included in surveys of German
(or Germanic) philosophy due to his extensive
engagement with German thinkers.
== 17th century ==
=== Leibniz ===
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was
both a philosopher and a mathematician who
wrote primarily in Latin and French.
Leibniz, along with René Descartes and Baruch
Spinoza, was one of the three great 17th century
advocates of rationalism.
The work of Leibniz also anticipated modern
logic and analytic philosophy, but his philosophy
also looks back to the scholastic tradition,
in which conclusions are produced by applying
reason to first principles or a priori definitions
rather than to empirical evidence.
Leibniz is noted for his optimism - his Théodicée
tries to justify the apparent imperfections
of the world by claiming that it is optimal
among all possible worlds.
It must be the best possible and most balanced
world, because it was created by an all powerful
and all knowing God, who would not choose
to create an imperfect world if a better world
could be known to him or possible to exist.
In effect, apparent flaws that can be identified
in this world must exist in every possible
world, because otherwise God would have chosen
to create the world that excluded those flaws.
Leibniz is also known for his theory of monads,
as exposited in Monadologie.
Monads are to the metaphysical realm what
atoms are to the physical/phenomenal.
They can also be compared to the corpuscles
of the Mechanical Philosophy of René Descartes
and others.
Monads are the ultimate elements of the universe.
The monads are "substantial forms of being"
with the following properties: they are eternal,
indecomposable, individual, subject to their
own laws, un-interacting, and each reflecting
the entire universe in a pre-established harmony
(a historically important example of panpsychism).
Monads are centers of force; substance is
force, while space, matter, and motion are
merely phenomenal.
== 18th century ==
=== Wolff ===
Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was the most
eminent German philosopher after Leibniz.
His main achievement was a complete oeuvre
on almost every scholarly subject of his time,
displayed and unfolded according to his demonstrative-deductive,
mathematical method, which perhaps represents
the peak of Enlightenment rationality in Germany.
Wolff was one of the first to use German as
a language of scholarly instruction and research,
although he also wrote in Latin, so that an
international audience could, and did, read
him.
A founding father of, among other fields,
economics and public administration as academic
disciplines, he concentrated especially in
these fields, giving advice on practical matters
to people in government, and stressing the
professional nature of university education.
=== Kant ===
In 1781, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) published
his Critique of Pure Reason, in which he attempted
to determine what we can and cannot know through
the use of reason independent of all experience.
Briefly, he came to the conclusion that we
could come to know an external world through
experience, but that what we could know about
it was limited by the limited terms in which
the mind can think: if we can only comprehend
things in terms of cause and effect, then
we can only know causes and effects.
It follows from this that we can know the
form of all possible experience independent
of all experience, but nothing else, but we
can never know the world from the “standpoint
of nowhere” and therefore we can never know
the world in its entirety, neither via reason
nor experience.
Since the publication of his Critique, Immanuel
Kant has been considered one of the greatest
influences in all of western philosophy.
In the late 18th and early 19th century, one
direct line of influence from Kant is German
Idealism.
Neo-Kantianism refers broadly to the revival
of the type of philosophy explained by Immanuel
Kant and of the interpretations of Kant provided
by post-Kantian philosophers such as Schopenhauer,
Jakob Friedrich Fries and Johann Friedrich
Herbart.
Major figures in the neo-Kantian movement,
which began around the 1860s, include Friedrich
Albert Lange and Hermann Cohen.
== 19th century ==
=== German idealism ===
The three most prominent German idealists
were Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814),
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854)
and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831),
who was the predominant figure in nineteenth
century German philosophy.
=== Schopenhauer ===
An idiosyncratic opponent of German idealism,
particularly Hegel's thought, was Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788 – 1860).
He was influenced by Eastern philosophy, particularly
Buddhism, and was known for his pessimism.
Schopenhauer's most influential work, The
World as Will and Representation, claimed
that the world is fundamentally what we recognize
in ourselves as our will.
His analysis of will led him to the conclusion
that emotional, physical, and sexual desires
can never be fulfilled.
Consequently, he eloquently described a lifestyle
of negating desires, similar to the ascetic
teachings of Vedanta and the Desert Fathers
of early Christianity.
=== Karl Marx and the Young Hegelians ===
Among those influenced by Hegel was a group
of young radicals called the Young Hegelians,
who were unpopular because of their radical
views on religion and society.
They included Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72),
Bruno Bauer (1809–82) and Max Stirner (1806–56)
among their ranks.
Karl Marx (1818–83) often attended their
meetings.
He developed an interest in Hegelianism, French
socialism and British economic theory.
He transformed the three into an essential
work of economics called Das Kapital, which
consisted of a critical economic examination
of capitalism.
Marxism became one of the major forces on
twentieth century world history.
=== Nietzsche ===
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was initially
a proponent of Schopenhauer.
However, he soon came to disavow Schopenhauer's
pessimistic outlook on life and sought to
provide a positive philosophy.
He believed this task to be urgent, as he
believed a form of nihilism caused by modernity
was spreading across Europe, which he summed
up in the phrase "God is dead".
His problem, then, was how to live a positive
life considering that if you believe in God,
you give in to dishonesty and cruel beliefs
(e.g. divine predestination of some individuals
to Hell), and if you don't believe in God,
you give in to nihilism.
He believed he found his solution in the concepts
of the Übermensch and Eternal Recurrence.
His work continues to have a major influence
on both philosophers and artists.
== 20th century ==
=== Analytic philosophy ===
==== Frege, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle
====
In the late 19th century, the predicate logic
of Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) overthrew Aristotelian
logic (the dominant logic since its inception
in Ancient Greece).
This was the beginning of analytic philosophy.
In the early part of the 20th century, a group
of German and Austrian philosophers and scientists
formed the Vienna Circle to promote scientific
thought over Hegelian system-building, which
they saw as a bad influence on intellectual
thought.
The group considered themselves logical positivists
because they believed all knowledge is either
derived through experience or arrived at through
analytic statements, and they adopted the
predicate logic of Frege, as well as the early
work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
as foundations to their work.
Wittgenstein did not agree with their interpretation
of his philosophy.
=== Continental philosophy ===
While some of the seminal philosophers of
twentieth-century analytical philosophy were
German-speakers, most German-language philosophy
of the twentieth century tends to be defined
not as analytical but 'continental' philosophy
– as befits Germany's position as part of
the European 'continent' as opposed to the
British Isles or other culturally European
nations outside of Europe.
==== Phenomenology ====
Phenomenology began at the start of the 20th
century with the descriptive psychology of
Franz Brentano (1838–1917), and then the
transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl
(1859–1938).
It was then transformed by Martin Heidegger
(1889–1976), whose famous book Being and
Time applied phenomenology to ontology, and
who, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein, is considered
one of the most influential philosophers of
the 20th century.
Phenomenology has had a large influence on
Continental Philosophy, particularly existentialism
and poststructuralism.
Heidegger himself is often identified as an
existentialist, though he would have rejected
this.
==== Hermeneutics ====
Hermeneutics is the philosophical theory and
practice of interpretation and understanding.
Originally hermeneutics referred to the interpretation
of texts, especially religious texts.
In the 19th century, Friedrich Schleiermacher
(1768–1834), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911)
and others expanded the discipline of hermeneutics
beyond mere exegesis and turned it into a
general humanistic discipline.
Schleiermacher wondered whether there could
be a hermeneutics that was not a collection
of pieces of ad hoc advice for the solution
of specific problems with text interpretation
but rather a "general hermeneutics," which
dealt with the "art of understanding" as such,
which pertained to the structure and function
of understanding wherever it occurs.
Later in the 19th century, Dilthey began to
see possibilities for continuing Schleiermacher's
general hermeneutics project as a "general
methodology of the humanities and social sciences".In
the 20th century, hermeneutics took an 'ontological
turn'.
Martin Heidegger's Being and Time fundamentally
transformed the discipline.
No longer was it conceived of as being about
understanding linguistic communication, or
providing a methodological basis for the human
sciences - as far as Heidegger was concerned,
hermeneutics is ontology, dealing with the
most fundamental conditions of man's being
in the world.
The Heideggerian conception of hermeneutics
was further developed by Heidegger's pupil
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), in his book
Truth and Method.
==== Frankfurt School ====
In 1923, Carl Grünberg founded the Institute
for Social Research, drawing from Marxism,
Freud's psychoanalysis and Weberian philosophy,
which came to be known as the "Frankfurt School".
Expelled by the Nazis, the school reformed
again in Frankfurt after World War II.
Although they drew from Marxism, they were
outspoken opponents of Stalinism.
Books from the group, like Adorno’s and
Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment
and Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, critiqued
what they saw as the failure of the Enlightenment
project and the problems of modernity.
Postmodernists consider the Frankfurt school
to be one of their precursors.Since the 1960s
the Frankfurt School has been guided by Jürgen
Habermas' (born 1929) work on communicative
reason, linguistic intersubjectivity and what
Habermas calls "the philosophical discourse
of modernity".
== See also ==
Goethe-Institut
List of German-language philosophers
Continental philosophy
Critical theory
Culture of Germany
German idealism
German romanticism
German literature
History of philosophy
List of Austrian intellectual traditions
Logical empiricism
Modern philosophy
Phenomenology
Postmodernism
Prussian virtues
Vienna Circle
== References ==
== External links ==
Sassen, Brigitte.
"German Philosophy in the 18th Century Prior
to Kant".
In Zalta, Edward N. Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy.
Austrian Philosophy by Barry Smith
