Neo-Kantianism was an important movement in German philosophy of the late 19th century: Frederick Beiser traces its development back to the late 18th century, and explains its rise as a response to three major developments in German culture: the collapse of speculative idealism; the materialism controversy; and the identity crisis of philosophy.
This is the first history in English of German historicism, the intellectual tradition which holds that history is the key to understanding all human values, beliefs and actions. Beiser surveys the key thinkers from the mid-18th to the early 20th century and illuminates the sources and reasons for this revolution in modern thought.
Frederick C. Beiser presents a study of the pessimism that dominated German philosophy from the 1860s to c. 1900: the theory that life is not worth living. He explores its major defenders and chief critics, and examines how the theory redirected German philosophy away from the logic of the sciences and toward an examination of the value of life.
"This book is an intellectual biography of Johann Friedrich, who was one of the most famous philosophers in early 19th century Germany. Herbart was trained in the German idealist tradition under Fichte, but he eventually broke with Fichte and major idealist doctrines. His own philosophy was opposed to the idealist tradition in important respects: he defended a dualism between the factual and normative; he was an ontological pluralist rather than monist; and he accepted crucial Kantian dualisms that had been rejected by the idealists (viz. the dualism between essence and existence, reason and sensibility). While Herbart still retained elements of idealism, he was more realistic than his idealistic counterparts, maintaining that elements of the sensible manifold were given rather than posited by the mind. Herbart was also an important forerunner of analytic philosophy, first in breaking with the idealist tradition, and second in insisting that the proper method of philosophy is the analysis of concepts rather than speculation about the universe as a whole"--
Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century typically focus on its first half—when Hegel, idealism, and Romanticism dominated. By contrast, the remainder of the century, after Hegel's death, has been relatively neglected because it has been seen as a period of stagnation and decline. But Frederick Beiser argues that the second half of the century was in fact one of the most revolutionary periods in modern philosophy because the nature of philosophy itself was up for grabs and the very absence of certainty led to creativity and the start of a new era. In this innovative concise history of German philosophy from 1840 to 1900, Beiser focuses not on themes or individual thinkers but rather on the period’s five great debates: the identity crisis of philosophy, the materialism controversy, the methods and limits of history, the pessimism controversy, and the Ignorabimusstreit. Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Dilthey play important roles in these controversies but so do many neglected figures, including Ludwig Büchner, Eugen Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Fraunstaedt, Hermann Lotze, Adolf Trendelenburg, and two women, Agnes Taubert and Olga Pluemacher, who have been completely forgotten in histories of philosophy. The result is a wide-ranging, original, and surprising new account of German philosophy in the critical period between Hegel and the twentieth century.
Sentinel of Truth provides a gripping account of the assassination of two Turkish diplomats in California in 1973 by an aggrieved septuagenarian survivor of the Armenian Genocide, and explains how a study of the global campaign against Turkey's denial of the genocide cannot but include the killings carried out by Gourgen Yanikian. By describing in detail the effects these and subsequent acts of militancy had on the consciousness of diasporan Armenians, author Tigran Kalaydjian sheds new light on the activities of the tightly-knit group of people that is spearheading the drive for a comprehensive redress of the human rights disaster of 1915 and elucidates the many facets of the Diaspora's decades-long struggle for justice. "Highly recommended for anyone interested in the Armenian people, 20th century history, United States jurisprudence, the triumph of the state over the individual and the paucity of morality in modern-day politics; also, for the general reader, as an informative and heart-rending factual account of a little known chapter in European history." -
Weltschmerz is a study of the pessimism that dominated German philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century. Pessimism was essentially the theory that life is not worth living. This theory was introduced into German philosophy by Schopenhauer, whose philosophy became very fashionable in the 1860s. Frederick C. Beiser examines the intense and long controversy that arose from Schopenhauer's pessimism, which changed the agenda of philosophy in Germany away from the logic of the sciences and toward an examination of the value of life. He examines the major defenders of pessimism (Philipp Mainländer, Eduard von Hartmann and Julius Bahnsen) and its chief critics, especially Eugen Dühring and the neo-Kantians. The pessimism dispute of the second half of the century has been largely ignored in secondary literature and this book is a first attempt since the 1880s to re-examine it and to analyze the important philosophical issues raised by it. The dispute concerned the most fundamental philosophical issue of them all: whether life is worth living.
This book is the first complete intellectual biography of Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) and the only work to cover all his major philosophical and Jewish writings. Frederick C. Beiser pays special attention to all phases of Cohen's intellectual development, its breaks and its continuities, throughout seven decades. The guiding goal behind Cohen's intellectual career, he argues, was the development of a radical rationalism, one committed to defending the rights of unending enquiry and unlimited criticism. Cohen's philosophy was therefore an attempt to defend and revive the Enlightenment belief in the authority of reason; his critical idealism an attempt to justify this belief and to establish a purely rational worldview. According to this interpretation, Cohen's thought is resolutely opposed to any form of irrationalism or mysticism because these would impose arbitrary and artificial limits on criticism and enquiry. It is therefore critical of those interpretations which see Cohen's philosophy as a species of proto-existentialism (Rosenzweig) or Jewish mysticism (Adelmann and Köhnke). Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography attempts to unify the two sides of Cohen's thought, his philosophy and his Judaism. Maintaining that Cohen's Judaism was not a limit to his radical rationalism but a consistent development of it, Beiser contends that his religion was one of reason. He concludes that most critical interpretations have failed to appreciate the philosophical depth and sophistication of his Judaism, a religion which committed the believer to the unending search for truth and the striving to achieve the cosmopolitan ideals of reason.
The significance of the German philosopher and social thinker, Georg Simmel (1858–1918), is only now being recognised by intellectual historians. Through penetrating readings of Simmel's thought, taken as a series of reflections on the essence of modernity and modern civilisation, Efraim Podoksik places his ideas within the context of intellectual life in Germany, and especially Berlin, under the Kaiserreich. Modernity, characterised by the growing differentiation and fragmentation of culture and society, was a fundamental issue during Simmel's life, underpinning central intellectual debates in Imperial Germany. Simmel's thought is depicted here as an attempt at transforming the complexity of these debates into a coherent worldview that can serve as an effective guide to understanding their main parameters. Paying particular attention to the genealogy and usage of the concepts of Bildung, culture and civilisation in Germany, this study offers contextual analyses of Simmel's philosophies of culture, society, art, religion and the feminine, as well as his interpretations of Dante, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe and Rembrandt.
