How did the First World War, the so-called 'Great War' - widely seen on all sides as 'the war to end all wars' - impact the development of German philosophy? Combining history and biography with astute philosophical and textual analysis, Nicolas de Warren addresses here the intellectual trajectories of ten significant wartime philosophers: Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Ernst Cassirer, Hermann Cohen, György Lukács, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Franz Rosenzweig, Max Scheler and Georg Simmel. In exploring their individual works written during and after the War, the author reveals how philosophical concepts and new forms of thinking were forged in response to this unprecedented catastrophe. In reassessing standardized narratives of German thought, the book deepens and enhances our understanding of the intimate and complex relationship between philosophy and violence by demonstrating how the 1914-18 conflict was a crucible for ways of thinking that still define us today.

The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy examines three generations of analytic philosophers, who between them founded the modern discipline of analytic philosophy in Britain. The book explores how philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer, Gilbert Ryle and Isaiah Berlin believed in a link between German aggression in the twentieth century and the nineteenth-century philosophy of Hegel and Nietzsche. Thomas L. Akehurst thus identifies in this political critique of continental philosophy the origins of the hugely significant faultline between analytic and continental thought, an aspect of twentieth-century philosophy that is still poorly understood. The book also uncovers a tripartite alliance in British analytic philosophy, between nation, political virtue and philosophical method. In revealing this structure behind the assumptions of certain analytical thinkers, Akehurst challenges the conventional wisdom that sees analytic philosophy as a semi-detached narrowly academic pursuit. On the contrary, this important book suggests that the analytic philosophers were espousing a national philosophy, one they believed operated in harmony with British thinking and the British values of liberty and tolerance.

Two eminent French philosophers discuss German philosophy—including the legacy of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, Fichte, Marx, and Heidegger—from a French perspective. In this book, Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy, the two most important living philosophers in France, discuss German philosophy from a French perspective. Written in the form of a dialogue, and revised and expanded from a 2016 conversation between the two philosophers at the Universität der Künste Berlin, the book offers not only Badiou's and Nancy's reinterpretations of German philosophers and philosophical concepts, but also an accessible introduction to the greatest thinkers of German philosophy. Badiou and Nancy discuss and debate such topics as the legacies of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, as well as Nietzsche, Adorno, Fichte, Schelling, and the unavoidable problem of Heidegger and Nazism. The dialogue is contentious, friendly, and often quotable, with strong—at times passionate—positions taken by both Badiou and Nancy, who find themselves disagreeing over Kant, for example, and in unexpected agreement on Marx, for another. What does it mean, then, to conduct a dialogue on German philosophy from a French perspective? As volume editor Jan Völker observes, “German philosophy” and “French philosophy” describe complex constellations that, despite the reference to nation-states and languages, above all encompass shared concepts and problems—although these take a range of forms. Perhaps they can reveal their essential import only in translation.

The path taken by German philosophy in the twentieth century is one of the most exciting and controversial in the history of human thought, by turns radical and conservative and secular and religious. In this outstanding introduction, German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Dilthey to Honneth—the third and final volume in his trilogy—Julian Young examines the work of eight German philosophers and theologians of the period. He discusses their engagement with the deepest existential questions, their critique of the rationalization and mechanization of modernity, and their commitment to varying forms of liberalism, socialism, and democracy. Young introduces and assesses the thought of the following figures: Wilhelm Dilthey: the need for ‘worldviews’, and the distinction between ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’ as a bulwark against the reduction of human beings to scientific quanta Karl Jaspers: existentialism, the challenge of nihilism, and the turn to theology Edith Stein: the phenomenology of empathy, community versus society, and the turn to Catholicism Paul Tillich: philosophical theology and the ‘theonomous’ life Martin Buber: recovering the ‘thou’ in the face of modernity’s reduction of everything to an ‘it’; the kibbutz as the paradigm of a socialist community Hans Jonas: the mortal threat posed by the unknown consequences of modern technology and the ethics of responsibility for the planet Erich Fromm: the ‘art of loving’ as a bulwark against hard and soft totalitarianism; the replacement of capitalism by communitarian socialism Axel Honneth: contemporary Hegelianism and the ethics and politics of recognition; the nature of real freedom. Lucidly and engagingly written, German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Dilthey to Honneth is essential reading for students of German philosophy, phenomenology, and theology and will also be of interest to students in related fields such as literature, political theory, and sociology. German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Weber to Heidegger (2018) and German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Lukács to Strauss (2020) are also available from Routledge.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge frequently bridged the gap between British and European Romantic thought. This study sets Coleridge's mode of thinking within a German Romantic philosophical context as the place where his ideas can naturally extend themselves, stretch and find speculations of comparable ambition. It argues that Coleridge found his philosophical adventures in the dominant idiom of his times exciting and as imaginatively engaging as poetry. Paul Hamilton situates major themes in Coleridge's prose and poetic writings in relation to his passion for German philosophy. He argues that Coleridge's infectious attachment to German (post-Kantian) philosophy was due to its symmetries with the structure of his Christian belief. Coleridge is read as an excited and winning expositor of this philosophy's power to articulate an absolute grounding of reality. Its comprehensiveness, however, rendered redundant further theological description, undermining the faith it had seemed to support. Thus arose Coleridge's anxious disguising of his German plagiarisms, aspersions cast on German originality, and his claims to have already experienced their insights within his own religious sensibility or in the writings of Anglican divines and neo-Platonists. This book recovers the extent to which his ideas call to be expanded within German philosophical debate.

German philosophy remains the core of modern philosophy. Without Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Husserl there would be no Anglo-American 'analytical' style of philosophy. Moreover, without Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, the 'Continental Philosophy' of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, and Zizek, which has had major effects on humanities subjects in recent years, is incomprehensible. Knowledge of German philosophy is, then, an indispensable prerequisite of theoretically informed study in the humanities as a whole. German Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction discusses the idea that German philosophy forms one of the most revealing responses to the problems of 'modernity'. The rise of the modern natural sciences and the related decline of religion raises a series of questions, which recur throughout German philosophy, concerning the relationships between knowledge and faith, reason and emotion, and scientific, ethical, and artistic ways of seeing the world. There are also many significant philosophers who are generally neglected in most existing English-language treatments of German philosophy, which tend to concentrate on the canonical figures. This Very Short Introduction will include reference to these thinkers and suggests how they can be used to question more familiar German philosophical thought. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century is the first collective critical study of this important period in intellectual history. The volume is divided into four parts. The first part explores individual philosophers, including Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, amongst other great thinkers of the period. The second addresses key philosophical movements: Idealism, Romanticism, Neo-Kantianism, and Existentialism. The essays in the third part engage with different areas of philosophy that received particular attention at this time, including philosophy of nature, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of history, and hermeneutics. Finally, the contributors turn to discuss central philosophical topics, from skepticism to mat-erialism, from dialectics to ideas of historical and cultural Otherness, and from the reception of antiquity to atheism. Written by a team of leading experts, this Handbook will be an essential resource for anyone working in the area and will lead the direction of future research.

The story of German philosophy from the Middle Ages to today In an accessible narrative that explains complex ideas in clear language, Vittorio Hösle traces the evolution of German philosophy and describes its central influence on other aspects of German culture, including literature, politics, and science, from the Middle Ages to today. A Short History of German Philosophy addresses the philosophical changes brought about by Luther’s Reformation, and then presents a detailed account of German philosophy from Leibniz to Kant; the rise of a new form of humanities; and the German Idealists. The following chapters investigate the collapse of the German synthesis in Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche. Turning to the twentieth century, the book explores the rise of analytical philosophy; the foundation of the historical sciences; Husserl’s phenomenology and its radical alteration by Heidegger; the Nazi philosophers Gehlen and Schmitt; and the main West German philosophers after 1945. Arguing that there was a distinctive German philosophical tradition from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the book closes by examining why that tradition largely ended in the recent past. A philosophical history remarkable for its scope, brevity, and lucidity, this is an invaluable book for students of philosophy and anyone interested in German intellectual and cultural history.

The humanistic/historicist Hegel -- American Hegelianism, 1830-1900 -- Dewey in Burlington and Baltimore, 1859-1884 -- Dewey in Michigan, 1884-1894 -- Dewey's transitional years, 1894-1904 -- From actualism to brutalism, 1904-1916.