German philosophy

German philosophy is philosophy in the German language or philosophy by German people, a part of German culture.

It covers figures such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and the Frankfurt School.

German philosophers are central to major philosophical movements such as rationalism, German idealism, Romanticism, dialectical materialism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, logical positivism, and critical theory.

It is influential for both contemporary philosophical schools: the analytic and continental traditions, though naturally most German universities study continental philosophy. Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein are considered two of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

Middle ages

While Saint Ambrose was born in modern-day Germany, German philosophy starts much later. The first philosophical controversy on German soil happened in the year 848, when Rabanus Maurus (c. 780–856), a student of Charlemagne's preferred scholar Alcuin of York, responded to Gottschalk of Orbais' doctrine of double predestination. Rabanus was deacon at the Benedictine Abbey of Fulda in Hesse, and has been called "the teacher of Germany."

Aside from Fulda, the other center of learning in Germany was St. Emmeram's in Regensburg. Otloh of Sankt Emmeram (c. 1010–c. 1072) and Manegold of Lautenbach (c. 1030–c. 1103) were sophisticated defenders of anti-philosophy. By the twelfth century, all the monks at St. Emmeram's were said to be illiterate.

Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism

Knowledge of Latin had declined so much that Notker Labeo (c. 950–1022) translated Boethius, Capella, and some Aristotle into German, inventing the first German philosophical vocabulary.

Neoplatonist, nun, and polymath Hildegard von Bingen (c. 1098–1179) known as the "Sibyl of the Rhine" knew Latin and wrote on theology, cosmology, and natural philosophy. In works like Scivias, she wrote God infused life with viriditas.

Hugh of Saint Victor (c. 1096–1141) traveled to France to study and wrote on Neoplatonic mysticism and philosophy. Otto of Freising (c. 1111–1158) was likely his student and introduced the complete logic of Aristotle to Germany.

Albertus Magnus

Aristotle's other works became available from translators in Spain. Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280) introduced Scholasticism into Germany, with writings covering the Physics of Aristotle and a wide range of topics in science and philosophy. Albertus Magnus influenced the likes of Neoplatonist Theodoric of Freiberg (c. 1250–c. 1311). The Italian, Aristotelian philosopher Thomas Aquinas was also a student of Albertus Magnus.

Aristotelians with a blend of Neoplatonism like Theodoric were known as Albertists in contrast to the purely Aristotelian Thomists. German Dominicans tended to be Albertists. Other examples include Ulrich (c. 1225–1277) and Hugh Ripelin of Strassburg (c. 1205–c. 1270), and the later Heymeric de Campo (1395–1460). The Thomists included John of Lichtenberg, Heinrich of Lubeck, Heinrich of Gorkum (c. 1378–1431), Nicholas and Thomas of Strassburg (c. 1275–c. 1357), and Gerhard and Johann Sterngasse. Franciscan Duns Scotus died shortly after coming to teach in Cologne, and so Scotism had limited influence in Germany.

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–c. 1328) was an influential Catholic mystic and Neoplatonist at the Dominican order in Cologne. Eckhart combined with the Neoplatonic mysticism the non-philosophical mysticism found among female orders, such as that of Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207–c. 1282). Albertist Berthold of Moosburg (d. c. 1365) succeeded Eckhart at Cologne.

German Renaissance

Johannes Gutenberg (1406–1468) invented the printing press. The creation of the Gutenberg Bible, a crucial work that marked the start of the Gutenberg Revolution and the age of the printed book in the Western world.

Nominalism

The British philosopher and Franciscan William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) spent his final years taking refuge with Louis IV, Holy Roman Emperor at the Alter Hof in Munich, and his nominalism proved influential in German philosophy, through later figures such as scholastic philosopher Gabriel Biel (c. 1420–1495), who was the first professor of theology at the University of Tübingen.

Albrecht Dürer's Portrait of Erasmus

The Schism of 1378 drove many nominalist teachers from France to Germany. Some fled to the University of Prague. Albert of Saxony (c. 1320–1390) was a student of French philosopher Jean Buridan, who contributed to logic, and to physics with a theory of impetus. He became the first rector at the University of Vienna. Albert was followed at Vienna by Heinrich of Hainbuch who taught Ockham's conciliar theory. Marsilius of Inghen became first rector at the University of Heidelberg.

Humanism

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) and Dutch philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466–1536) were two major figures of Northern Renaissance (and German Renaissance) humanism.

Cusa was a student of Heymeric de Campo, and a mystic who believed in the coincidentia oppositorum, suggesting Cusa was a dialetheist, or one who denies the law of non-contradiction. Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia ('Of Learned Ignorance') maintains the finite human mind cannot fully know the divine, infinite mind ('the Maximum'), but can nonetheless attain "learned ignorance". Cusa's work shows the influence of neoplatonism and negative theology.

Erasmus was a scholar of medieval Christianity. His contemporaries charged him with “laying the egg that Luther hatched.” Erasmus is best known for works like The Praise of Folly and Handbook of a Christian Knight.

Another humanist was Johann Heynlin, who was a realist opponent of nominalism. Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) was another. He advocated the teaching of Greek and Hebrew, and wrote on the Jewish mysticism of Kabbalah in De Arte Cabalistica (1517).

Reformation

Portrait of Martin Luther

Martin Luther (1483–1546), a professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg, birthed the Reformation. Luther's translation of the Bible into German made the Bible vastly more accessible to the laity, which had a wide impact on both the Church and German culture. Luther sparked an international debate on indulgences and other Church practices in works like his Ninety-five Theses (1517), which, according to Philip Melanchthon, were posted on the door of All Saints' Church, Wittenberg He is considered one of the most influential figures in Western and Christian history.

Protestantism and Lutheranism held salvation was achieved by faith alone (sola fide) and through God alone (monergism). While he praised reason as "the best and something divine," Luther saw it as inadequate in achieving knowledge of God, famously calling reason "the Devil's harlot".

Erasmus argued against Luther in De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collatio, arguing for free will and synergism. Following sudden, violent, iconoclastic rioting in the city of Basel in early 1529, led by Œcolampadius, a former assistant of Erasmus, in which elected Catholic councilmen were deposed, Basel definitely adopted the Reformation. Erasmus departed by ship to the Catholic university town of Freiburg im Breisgau to be under the protection of his former student, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria.

Paracelsus

Paracelsus (1493–1541) was an influential mystic hermeticist, alchemist, and pioneer of the Medical Renaissance known as the "father of toxicology". In addition to Aristotle's four classical elements of earth, water, air, and fire; he added the three principles or tria prima of sulphur, mercury, and salt. Paracelsus thought the tria prima contained the poisons contributing to all diseases.

17th century

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was a natural philosopher from the Stuttgart Region and a key figure in the Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion. He wrote the Rudolphine Tables, based on the data and measurements of Dane Tycho Brahe.

Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), the Lutheran mystic philosopher, was influenced by Paracelsus and founded Christian theosophy. He influenced later key figures including F. W. J. Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel, who called him "the first German philosopher". Bohme wrote The Way to Christ and his school of thought is known as Behmenism.

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680) was one of the first to pose the interaction problem for substance dualism to French philosopher and "father of modern philosophy" René Descartes.

Leibniz

Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was both a philosopher and a mathematician who wrote primarily in Latin and French. Leibniz, along with Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was one of the three great 17th century advocates of rationalism, the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge." The work of Leibniz 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 definitions rather than to empirical evidence. His early philosophy is found in the Discourse on Metaphysics.

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. 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

A heavy influence on the Enlightenment was the work of British natural philosopher Sir Isaac Newton and the philosophy of Newtonianism, who published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1686, which included his laws of motion, introducing classical mechanics in physics.

Wolff

Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was the most eminent German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant. 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.

Art theorists Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Georg Friedrich Meier were students of Wolff. Baumgarten coined the term aesthetics.

Kant

Immanuel Kant

In 1781, Königsberg University professor Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) published his elaborate philosophy of transcendental idealism in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant attempted to determine what we can and cannot know through the use of reason independent of all experience, which Kant called the synthetic a priori. 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 terms in which the mind can think: if we can only comprehend things in terms of, for example, 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 in the apparent, phenomenal world, but nothing else, we can never know the noumenal world as it really is, the "thing-in-itself" 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. Kant saw himself as engaged in a "Copernican Revolution" which shifted one's outlook into the mind rather than out to the world. Kant has been regarded as the "destroyer" of (scholastic) metaphysics ever since he was called the "all-destroying Kant" by Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786).

Kant was a Pietist who tried to establish the limits of knowledge “in order to make room for faith”. Kant also published the Prolegomena, the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment. The Critique of Practical Reason has Kant's deontological ethics, with the categorical imperative and a moral argument for God. There was also Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and The Metaphysics of Morals. The Critique of Judgment contains Kant's aesthetics and philosophy of art.

Kant was also a major advocate of the Enlightenment who wrote Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose and adopted the phrase Sapere aude (Dare to know) in his essay "Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" (1784). Kant published three separate texts in 1756 on the Lisbon earthquake. Kant's theory, which involved shifts in huge caverns filled with hot gases, though inaccurate, was one of the first attempts to explain earthquakes in natural rather than supernatural terms. According to Walter Benjamin, It "probably represents the beginnings of scientific geography in Germany. And certainly the beginnings of seismology". Kant also wrote on anthropology in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.

Lessing

Another German Enlightenment advocate was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) who wrote on religious tolerance. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) debated the pantheism controversy with Moses Mendelssohn, a result of Lessing privately avowing Spinozism.

Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn was a German-Jewish philosopher who wrote Phaedon, a defense of immortality resulting from the death of Lessing admirer Thomas Abbt.

19th century

German idealism

German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with German Romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment. The most prominent German idealists in the movement, besides Kant, 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. Also important were Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823), and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 –1860).

Hamann and Herder

Johann Georg Hamann

Johann Gottfried Herder

Immanuel Kant's criticism of rationalism was a source of influence for early German Romanticism, which was closely associated with the Counter-Enlightenment. Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) were influential on both the proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang movement and on Romanticism itself.

Hamann wrote Socratic Memorabilia, comparing Socratic ignorance with religious faith. Hamann's translation of David Hume into German is considered by most scholars to be the one that Kant credited with awakening him from his "dogmatic slumber". Hamann also introduced Kant to the work of Rousseau. His most notable contributions to philosophy were his thoughts on language. He famously said that "Reason is language" ("Vernunft ist Sprache"). His student Herder published Treatise on the Origin of Language. Herder was one of the first to argue that language shapes the frameworks and the patterns of thought. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) was also a contemporary German philosopher of language.

Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

An early participant in the Sturm und Drang movement was polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), widely regarded as the most influential German writer. He was also a part of the Weimar Classicism movement. Goethe developed a friendship with Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). He is the namesake of the Goethe-Institut.

Goethe was also a natural philosopher. Goethe criticized the taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus and published his own work on morphology, the Metamorphosis of Plants (1790). Goethe advocated the law of compensation, which stated, as he put it, "in order to spend on one side, nature is forced to economize on the other side." He also published the Theory of Colours (1810). Goethe was opposed to Isaac Newton's theory of color found in Opticks.

Early Romantics

The Early Romantics centered in Jena included Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), Novalis (1772–1801), brothers Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). Karl Schlegel coined the term historicism. According to Schlegel, art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s approach to history marked the beginning of a new era in philosophy by recognizing the unique character and distinctiveness of antiquity.

Passivity was a key element of the Romantic mood in Germany, and it was brought by the Romantics into their own religious and philosophical views. The theologian Schleiermacher argued that the true essence of religion lies not in the active love of one’s neighbor, but in the passive contemplation of the infinite. Schleiermacher also contributed to the history of philosophy as the pioneer of Heraclitus studies and one who challenged the notion of Plato's unwritten doctrines.

August Ludwig Hülsen was a platonic realist. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. According to György Lukács, Kierkegaard's views on philosophy and aesthetics were also an offshoot of Romanticism.

Fichte

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814)

As a representative of subjective idealism, Fichte rejected the Kantian "thing-in-itself." Fichte states the starting point of his philosophy is the absolute "I," which itself creates the world with all its laws. Fichte understands the activity of this "I" as the activity of thought, as a process of self-awareness. Fichte recognizes absolute free will, God and the immortality of the soul. He sees in law one of the manifestations of the “I".

Romanticism also saw the birth of nationalism, inspired by the likes of Rousseau and Herder. The word Volkstum, or nationality, was coined in German as part of the struggle against Napoleon to the now conquering French emperor. Fichte is regarded as one of the founders of modern German nationalism when he expressed the unity of language and nation in his Addresses to the German Nation (1808)":

Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole. ...Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that common quality, as well as in accordance with his own peculiar quality—then, and then only, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be.

The philosophy of Fichte was of pivotal importance for the Romantics. Karl Schlegel identified the "three sources of Romanticism": the French Revolution, Fichte's philosophy, and Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister.

Schelling

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who initially adhered to the ideas of Fichte, and was associated with the Schlegel brothers in Jena, subsequently created his own philosophical system. Schelling called his philosophy "the philosophy of identity."

In natural philosophy, Schelling advanced organicism and Naturphilosophie (his interpretation of nature as an expression of spiritual powers). Schelling set himself the task of knowing the absolute, infinite spirit that lies at the basis of empirical visible nature. According to Schelling, the science of nature, based exclusively on reason, is designed to reveal the unconditioned cause that produces all natural phenomena. Schelling considered the absolute as a beginning capable of self-development through contradictions; in this sense, Schelling’s philosophy is characterized by some features of idealist dialectics.

In his early philosophy, around 1800, Schelling assigned a special role to art, in which, according to him, the reality of "higher being" is fully comprehended. Schelling interpreted art as "revelation." The artist, according to Schelling at this time, is a kind of mystical creature who creates in unconsciousness. In Schelling philosophical system, the creative absolute (God) is immersed in the same passive, motionless state as Schleiermacher's God.

For Schelling, the main instrument of creativity is intuition, "inner contemplation." In later life, Schelling evolves towards a mythological and mysticist philosophy (Mysterienlehre). He was invited by the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV to the post of professor at the University of Berlin with the aim of combating the then-popular ideas of the left-liberal Young Hegelians. It was during this period of his life that Schelling created the mystical "philosophy of revelation". György Lukács called Schelling's philosophy "the first manifestation of irrationalism".

Hegel

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is widely considered to be the greatest German idealist philosopher. According to Hegel’s system of objective or absolute idealism, reality is self-movement, and its activity can be expressed only in thinking, in self-knowledge. It is internally contradictory, it moves and changes, passing into its opposite.

Hegel presents the dialectical process of self-development in three main stages, which are ordered conceptually, not temporally. The first stage is logical, was describes the "pre-natural" structure being in the "element of pure thinking." At this stage, the "absolute idea" appears as a system of logical concepts and categories, as a system of logic. This part of Hegel's philosophical system is set forth in his Science of Logic. At the second stage, the "idea" is considered "in its externality" as nature. Hegel expounded his doctrine of nature in The Philosophy of Nature. The highest, third step in the self-development of the idea is spirit, which Hegel, for the most part, presents as it increasingly comes to know itself in history. Hegel reveals this stage of development of the "absolute idea" in his work Philosophy of Spirit from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and in his lectures at the University of Berlin, many of which cover material not found in his published writings. The highest stage of spirit is presented as in the forms of art, religion, and philosophy.

The main works of Hegel are The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Science of Logic (1812–1816), Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Logic, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Spirit) (1817), Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821).

Jacobi

Fichte was accused of atheism, and in the atheism dispute, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi wrote that the Enlightenment and philosophy led to nihilism, popularizing the concept. Jacobi advocated fideism or Glaube (variously translated as faith or "belief") and Offenbarung (revelation) instead of speculative reason.

Reinhold

Karl Leonhard Reinhold advanced "elementary philosophy" which held the first principle of philosophy is "the principle of consciousness" that there is a subject, object, and a relation between them.

Hegelianism

Hegel was hugely influential throughout the nineteenth century.

Right Hegelians

Among those influenced by Hegel immediately after his death in 1831, two distinct groups can be roughly divided into the politically and religiously radical 'left', or 'young', Hegelians and the more conservative 'right', or 'old', Hegelians. The Right Hegelians were Hegel's direct successors at the Fredrick William University (now the Humboldt University of Berlin) and followed the master in believing that the dialectic of history had come to an end—Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit reveals itself to be the culmination of history as the reader reaches its end. Here he meant that reason and freedom had reached their maximums as they were embodied by the existing Prussian state. And here the master’s claim was viewed as paradox, at best; the Prussian regime indeed provided extensive civil and social services, good universities, high employment and some industrialization, but it was ranked as rather backward politically compared with the more liberal constitutional monarchies of France and Britain.

Speculative theism was an 1830s movement closely related to, but distinguished from, Right Hegelianism. Its proponents Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1796–1879), Christian Hermann Weisse (1801–1866), and Hermann Ulrici (1806–1884) were united in their demand to recover the "personal God" after panrationalist Hegelianism. The movement featured elements of anti-psychologism in the historiography of philosophy.

Young Hegelians

Ludwig Feuerbach

Bruno Bauer

David Strauss

Max Stirner

Members of the Young Hegelians

The Young Hegelians drew on Hegel's idea that the purpose and promise of history was the total negation of everything conducive to restricting freedom and reason; and they proceeded to mount radical critiques, first of religion and then of the Prussian political system. They felt Hegel's apparent belief in the end of history conflicted with other aspects of his thought and that, contrary to his later thought, the dialectic was certainly not complete; this they felt was obvious given the irrationality of religious beliefs and the empirical lack of freedoms—especially political and religious freedoms—in existing Prussian society. They rejected anti-utopian aspects of his thought that "Old Hegelians" have interpreted to mean that the world has already essentially reached perfection. They included Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), David Strauss (1808–74), Bruno Bauer (1809–82) and Max Stirner (1806–56) among their ranks.

There was also the materialism controversy. Zoologist Carl Vogt argued that mental processes were entirely physical, famously stating that "thoughts stand in the same relation to the brain as bile does to the liver or urine to the kidneys."

Feuerbach wrote The Essence of Christianity, which argued that God is anthropomorphizing. Strauss was a pioneer in the historical investigation of Jesus and connected to the Tübingen School. Bauer was another critic of both Judaism and Christianity and a central figure in the intellectual circles of the Vormärz, the period preceding the Revolutions of 1848. Stirner was an anarchist. The groups were not as unified or as self-conscious as the labels 'right' and 'left' make them appear. The term was first used by David Strauss to describe Bruno Bauer—who actually was a typically 'Left', or Young, Hegelian.

Marx and Engels

Karl Marx (1818–1883) 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.

Karl Marx

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), also a Young Hegelian originally, was a friend and associate of Marx, together with whom he wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848. Marx and Engels developed the criticism of private property and theory of scientific socialism (communism), and the doctrines of dialectical and historical materialism in contrast to German idealism. As they wrote in The German Ideology, "In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to Earth, here we ascend from Earth to heaven." As Marx similarly said in an afterward is Das Kapital, Hegel "is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again".

Engels' philosophical works include Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, which explains how Hegel and Feuerbach led to Marx. There was also The Holy Family (together with Marx, 1844) criticizing the Young Hegelians, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) studying the utopian socialists Charles Fourier and Robert Owen and their differences with Engels' version of socialism, Dialectics of Nature (1883) applying Marxist ideas, particularly those of dialectical materialism, to science, and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) arguing that the family is an ever-changing institution that has been shaped by capitalism.

Duhring

Engels dedicated his entire book Anti-Dühring (1878) to criticizing Dühring's views. Eugen Dühring was a German professor of mechanics, philosopher and economist. In philosophy he was an eclectic who combined positivism, mechanistic materialism and idealism into a "philosophy of the actual". Dühring’s views on philosophy, political economy and socialism found support among some Social Democrats, in particular by Eduard Bernstein.

Dietzgen

Joseph Dietzgen was a German leatherworker and social democrat, who independently developed a number of questions of philosophy and came to conclusions very close to the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels. After the revolution of 1848 he emigrated to America and in 1864 in search of work, he went to Russia. Working in a tannery in St. Petersburg, Dietzgen devoted all his leisure time to works in the field of philosophy, political economy and socialism. In Russia he wrote a large philosophical treatise, The Essence of the Mental Labor of Man, a review of the first volume of Capital by Karl Marx. In 1869 Dietzgen returned to Germany, and then moved again to America, where he wrote his philosophical works Excursions of a Socialist in the Field of the Theory of Knowledge and Acquisition of Philosophy.

Marx highly appreciated Dietzgen as a thinker. Noting a number of mistakes and confusion in his views, Marx wrote that Dietzgen expressed “many excellent thoughts, and as a product of the independent thinking of a worker, worthy of amazement.” Engels gave Dietzgen the same high assessment. “And it is remarkable,” wrote Engels, “that we were not alone in discovering this materialistic dialectic, which for many years now has been our best tool of labor and our sharpest weapon; the German worker Joseph Dietzgen rediscovered it independently of us and even independently of Hegel.”

The Academic socialists

The Kathedersozialismus movement (academic socialism) was a theoretical and political trend that arose in the second half of the 19th century in German universities. The “academic socialists” – mostly economists and sociologists belonging to the “Historical School” – tried to prove that a people’s state could be built in Prussian Germany through reform, without the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and of the state, thus rejecting the Marxist notion of class struggle. In 1872 the Kathedersozialisten formed in Germany the "Union of Social Policy". Their ideas were similar to those of the Fabian socialists in Britain.

“Academic socialism” supported a variation of Otto von Bismarck’s welfare state. The most notable “academic socialists” in Germany were Bruno Hildebrand, who was openly against Marx and Engels, Gustav von Schmoller, Adolph Wagner, Lujo Brentano, Johann Plenge, Hans Delbrück, Ferdinand Toennies and Werner Sombart. In the labor movement in Germany, their line was supported by Ferdinand Lassalle.

Schopenhauer

Main articles: Arthur Schopenhauer's aesthetics and Critique of the Schopenhauerian philosophy

Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher

Another idiosyncratic German philosopher, particularly an opponent of Hegel's thought, was Arthur Schopenhauer. He was taught by Gottlob Ernst Schulze, who wrote Aenesidemus (1792), a skeptical polemic against Kant and Reinhold. Schopenhauer was also influenced by Eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhism, and was known for his pessimism.

Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation (1818), claimed at the heart of the world and man lies the “will to life.” 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.

Towards the end of Schopenhauer's life and in the years after his death, post-Schopenhauerian pessimism became a rather popular "trend" in 19th century Germany. Nevertheless, it was viewed with disdain by the other popular philosophies at the time, such as Hegelianism, materialism, neo-Kantianism, and the emerging positivism. In an age of upcoming revolutions and exciting new discoveries in science, the resigned and a-progressive nature of the typical pessimist was seen as detriment to social development. To respond to this growing criticism, a group of philosophers greatly influenced by Schopenhauer such as Julius Bahnsen (1830–81), Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), Philipp Mainländer (1841–76), and even some of his personal acquaintances developed their own brand of pessimism, each in their own unique way.

Mainländer

Working in the metaphysical framework of Schopenhauer, Philipp Mainländer sees the "will" as the innermost core of being, the ontological arche. However, he deviates from Schopenhauer in important respects. With Schopenhauer the will is singular, unified and beyond time and space. Schopenhauer's transcendental idealism leads him to conclude that we only have access to a certain aspect of the thing-in-itself by introspective observation of our own bodies. What we observe as will is all there is to observe, nothing more. There are no hidden aspects. Furthermore, via introspection we can only observe our individual will. This also leads Mainländer to the philosophical position of pluralism.

Additionally, Mainländer accentuates on the idea of salvation for all of creation. This is yet another respect in which he differentiates his philosophy from that of Schopenhauer. With Schopenhauer, the silencing of the will is a rare event. The artistic genius can achieve this state temporarily, while only a few saints have achieved total cessation throughout history. For Mainländer, the entirety of the cosmos is slowly but surely moving towards the silencing of the will-to-live and to (as he calls it) "redemption".

Neo-Kantianism

Main article: Neo-Kantianism

Neo-Kantianism refers broadly to a revived type of philosophy along the lines of that laid down by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century, or more specifically by Schopenhauer's criticism of the Kantian philosophy in his work The World as Will and Representation, as well as by other post-Kantian philosophers such as Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843) and Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841).

The neo-Kantian schools tended to emphasize scientific readings of Kant, often downplaying the role of intuition in favour of concepts. However, the ethical aspects of neo-Kantian thought often drew them within the orbit of socialism, and they had an important influence on Austromarxism and the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein. The neo-Kantian school was of importance in devising a division of philosophy that has had durable influence well beyond Germany. It made early use of terms such as epistemology and upheld its prominence over ontology. By 1933 (after the rise of Nazism), the various neo-Kantian circles in Germany had dispersed.

Hermann Cohen became the leader of Marburg School (centered in the town of the same name), the other prominent representatives of which were Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer. Another important group, the Southwest (German) School (also known as the Heidelberg School or Baden School, centered in Heidelberg, Baden in Southwest Germany) included Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, Ernst Troeltsch, and Emil Lask. Windelband was an influence on sociologist Max Weber, best known as author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

The Marburg School emphasized epistemology and philosophical logic, whereas the Southwest school emphasized issues of culture and value theory (notably the fact–value distinction). A third group, mainly represented by Leonard Nelson, established the Göttingen-based neo-Friesian School which emphasized philosophy of science.

Teleology

Reinhold influenced Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–1872), who defended Aristotelian philosophy and teleology. The anti-psychologism of speculative theism influenced logician Hermann Lotze (1817–1881). Lotze proposed a view called teleological idealism, whose central principle is the principle of teleomechanism, the idea that, in logic, metaphysics and science, mechanism is compatible with teleology. Lotze was a major influence on perspectivist Gustav Teichmuller.

Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a philologist who was initially a proponent of Schopenhauer. However, he soon came to disavow Schopenhauer's believe in the will to life, replacing it with the will to power. He also disavowed Schopenhauer's pessimistic outlook on life and sought to provide a life-affirming, positive philosophy.

He believed this task to be urgent, as he believed a form of nihilism caused by modernity and Christianity was spreading across Europe, which in works like Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science, he summed up in the phrase "God is dead". He believed he found his solution in the concepts of the Übermensch and Eternal Recurrence. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche gives a genealogical critique of Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality.

Nietzsche's irrationalism was influenced by German romanticism, and Teichmuller's perspectivism was also an influence on Nietzsche. His work continues to have a major influence on both philosophers and artists.

Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey, founder (along with Nietzsche, Simmel, and Klages) of the intuitionist and irrationalist school of Lebensphilosophie in Germany, is credited with leading the Romantic revival in hermeneutics of the early 20th century. Dilthey was also a historist. With his Schleiermacher biography and works on Novalis, Hölderlin, and others, he was one of the initiators of the Romantic renaissance in the imperial period. His discovery and annotation of the young Hegel's manuscripts became crucial to the vitalistic interpretation of Hegelian philosophy in the post-war period; his Goethe study likewise ushered in the vitalistic interpretation of Goethe subsequently leading from Simmel and Gundolf to Klages. Dilthey was an influence on Martin Buber.

Mach and Avenarius

Ernst Mach

Ernst Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. Mach’s philosophy is set forth in his works Analysis of Sensations (1885), Cognition and Delusion (1905), and others. Mach viewed things as “complexes of sensations,” denying the existence of an external world independent of human consciousness.

Richard Avenarius

The philosophy of Machism found support among Western European Marxists such as Friedrich Adler and Otto Bauer, and in Russia among a part of the Bolshevik intelligentsia (Alexander Bogdanov, Vladimir Bazarov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Pavel Yushkevich, Nikolai Valentinov etc.). Machian views were also widespread among early 20th century Western physicists, including most notably Albert Einstein.

Richard Avenarius was a German philosopher and one of the founders of empirio-criticism. According to Avenarius, consciousness and being, subject and object ("I" and "environment") are in constant, obligatory connection ("fundamental coordination"); there is no being without consciousness, there is no consciousness without being. But Avenarius considered consciousness to be the basis of this connection. According to Avenarius, a thing cannot exist independently of consciousness, without a thinking subject.

Vladimir Lenin dedicated his entire book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909) to the criticism of the philosophical views of Mach and Avenarius, writing that "this philosophy serves the clergy, serves the same purposes as the philosophy of Berkeley and Hume."

Austrian realism

Franz Brentano introduced the problem of intentionality.

A realist school of thought called Austrian realism formed in the former state of Austria-Hungary.

In Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), University of Vienna philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano (1838–1917) gave to philosophy the problem of intentionality, or aboutness. For Brentano, all mental events or acts of consciousness had a real, non-mental intentional object, which the thinking is directed at or "about". Intentionality is "the mark of the mental." Intentionality is to be distinguished from intention or intension.

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction towards an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We could, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.

The School of Brentano included Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Alexius Meinong. Meinong founded the Graz School, and is known for his unique ontology of real, nonexistent objects; a solution to the problem of empty names. This view is known as Meinongianism, or pejoratively as Meinong's jungle. According to Meinong, objects like flying pigs or golden mountains are real and have being, even though they do not exist.

Christian von Ehrenfels is known as one of the founders and precursors of Gestalt psychology. The Berlin School of experimental psychology was founded by Carl Stumpf, a student of Brentano and Lotze.

The Polish Lwów–Warsaw school, founded by Kazimierz Twardowski, was also influenced by Brentano. Twardowski emphasized "small philosophy", or the detailed, systematic analysis of specific problems. Twardowski was further influenced by the Bohemian logical realist Bernard Bolzano.

20th century

Neo-Hegelianism

Neo-Hegelianism, also known as Post-Hegelianism, was a trend developing in the early 20th century, mostly but not exclusively in Germany. Important German neo-Hegelians include Richard Kroner, Siegfried Marck, Arthur Liebert, and Hermann Glöckner, while the Frankfurt School can also be said to have been influenced by neo-Hegelianism.

Spengler

Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler was a German historian and philosopher of history influenced by Goethe and Nietzsche, whose interests included mathematics, science, and art and their relation to his organic theory of history. The main work of Spengler, setting out his philosophy of history, The Decline of the West, was published shortly after the defeat of Imperial Germany in World War I. In this work, Spengler predicts the inevitable collapse of the capitalist civilization, which he identifies with European culture. Spengler’s philosophy is imbued with elitism and a dislike for democracy. He declared the workers (the “fourth estate”) to be “outside of culture,” “outside of history”; the mass, Spengler wrote, is the end of everything, “radical nothing.” Spengler praised the “Old Prussian spirit,” the monarchy, the nobility and militarism. For him, war is “an eternal form of higher human existence.”

Spengler’s philosophy of history is based on analogy and the denial of scientific knowledge. The historical researcher, in his opinion, is the more significant, the less he belongs to science. Spengler opposes intuition to logical, rational knowledge, denying the principle of causality and regularity in social life. Spengler rejects the possibility of knowing objective truth, defending absolute relativism. Along with historical regularity, Spengler rejects the concept of historical progress, tries to prove the meaninglessness of history and the absence of development in it. Spengler contrasts the scientific understanding of natural historical development with historical fatalism – predestination, “destiny.”

Spengler opposes whig history and adopts something more like a cyclical history. Spengler denies the unity of world history. His history breaks down into a number of completely independent, unique “cultures,” special organisms, guided by a unique idea and having an individual destiny, experiencing periods of early age emergence, middle age flourishing and old age dying. Spengler reduces the task of the philosophy of history to comprehending the “morphological structure” of each “culture,” which supposedly is based on the “soul of culture.” According to Spengler, Western European culture, which he calls Faustian, is ruled by the idea of infinity, and entered a stage of decline already starting from the 19th century, that is, with the victory of capitalism; the period of its heyday was the era of feudalism.

In his work Preussentum und Sozialismus Spengler advances the idea of “German socialism” against “Marxist socialism”. It has been argued that Spengler's ideas had an influence on Hitler and Nazism. A philosophy of history close to Spenglerian views was promoted after the Second World War by the English historian Arnold Toynbee.

National socialist philosophy

The 20th century saw Hitler's rise to power and Nazi Germany's combination of nationalism and socialism. Carl Schmitt who published The Concept of the Political joined the Nazi Party, as did Martin Heidegger. The best known work of Nazi philosophy was Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the 20th Century, which said soul was race seen from within. Its title was an homage to Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. One of the most prominent academic philosophers in Nazi Germany was Alfred Baeumler, who advocated the philosophy of Nietzsche and taught philosophy and political education in Berlin as the director of the Institute for Political Pedagogy. There was also Ernst Krieck.

Analytic philosophy

Gottlob Frege

Gottlob Frege

In the late 19th century, the predicate logic of Jena professor Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) made the first substantial advance over Aristotelian logic since its inception in Ancient Greece. Frege also proved influential and an opponent of idealism in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mathematics. This was the beginning of analytic philosophy, the dominant philosophical style in the Anglosphere.

He advocated logicism, the project of reducing arithmetic to pure logic; supporting Leibniz and opposing Kant in the philosophy of mathematics. Frege was also influenced by Lotze. With set theory Frege extended the work of German mathematicians Georg Cantor and Richard Dedekind, and argued for mathematical platonism. In the philosophy of language, Frege advocated a mediated reference theory in his paper On Sense and Reference, and for platonism about propositions in the article Thought.

Early Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle

In the early part of the 20th century, a group of German and Austrian philosophers and scientists formed the Vienna Circle (originally the Ernst Mach society) 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 (verificationism), and they adopted the predicate logic of Frege, as well as the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) in the Tractatus as foundations to their work.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein developed a comprehensive system of logical atomism, with a picture theory of meaning, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (German: Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, 1921), sometimes known as simply the Tractatus. Wittgenstein thought he had solved all the problems of philosophy with the Tractatus.

The book starts, "The world is all that is the case." Wittgenstein claims the universe is the totality of actual states of affairs and that these states of affairs can be expressed and mirrored by the language of first-order predicate logic. Thus, a picture of the universe can be constructed by expressing facts in the form of atomic propositions and linking them using logical operators.

The Tractatus introduced philosophers to the terms tautology, truth conditions, and to the truth table method. Wittgenstein believed tautologies or logical truths say nothing, but show the logical structure of the world, and has been labeled a mystic who believed in the ineffable by some readers. The Tractatus further ultimately concludes that all of its propositions are meaningless, illustrated with a ladder one must toss away after climbing up it. The book ends, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

The Vienna Circle was led by Moritz Schlick and included Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath. The closely related Berlin Circle was led by Hans Reichenbach and included Carl Hempel and mathematician David Hilbert. There was also the Dutch signific circle, which included L. E. J. Brouwer, founder of intuitionistic logic.

Later Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein then had a radical break with his early philosophy, as exemplified by the Philosophical Investigations.

The duck-rabbit illusion became famous when Wittgenstein used it to distinguish "seeing that" from "seeing as".

The later Wittgenstein develops a therapeutic approach. He introduces the concept of a "language-game" as a "form of life". By "language-game", he meant a language simpler than an entire language. Wittgenstein argued that a word or sentence has meaning only as a result of the "rule" of the "game" being played. Depending on the context, for example, the utterance "Water!" could be an order, the answer to a question, or some other form of communication. Rather than his prior picture theory of meaning, the later Wittgenstein advocates a theory of meaning as use, according to which words are defined by how they are used within the language-game.

The notion of family resemblance thinks things thought to be connected by one essential, common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of them. Games, which Wittgenstein used as an example to explain the notion, have become the classic example of a group that is related by family resemblance.

Philosophical Investigations also contains the private language argument. Another point Wittgenstein makes against the possibility of a private language involves the beetle-in-a-box thought experiment. He asks the reader to imagine that each person has a box, inside which is something that everyone intends to refer to with the word beetle. Further, suppose that no one can look inside another's box. Under such a situation, Wittgenstein says the word beetle is meaningless.

He also famously uses the duck-rabbit, an ambiguous image, as a means of describing two different ways of seeing: "seeing that" versus "seeing as".

Continental philosophy

Edmund Husserl

Karl Jaspers

Martin Heidegger

Hannah Arendt

Continental philosophers

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.

Existentialism had a big influence on continental philosophy. Phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is often identified as an existentialist, though he rejected this. Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) also rejected the label, despite being a student of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and so often identified as an existentialist.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology began at the start of the 20th century with the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Max Scheler (1874–1928) further developed the philosophical method of phenomenology. It was then transformed by Martin Heidegger, whose famous book Being and Time (1927) applied phenomenology to ontology. Phenomenology has had a large influence on Continental Philosophy, particularly existentialism and poststructuralism.

Hermeneutics

Main article: 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, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, 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

Main article: Frankfurt School

Theodor Adorno

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". This school founded critical theory and was associated with thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich.

Jürgen Habermas

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.

Benjamin was a colleague of Heidegger and Jaspers student Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. In the 1960s and the 1970s, Marcuse became known as the pre-eminent theorist of the New Left. Since the 1960s, the Frankfurt School has been guided by Jürgen Habermas' (1929–2026) work on communicative reason and linguistic intersubjectivity. Habermas had a famous debate with Niklas Luhmann.

See also

• History of philosophy
• List of Austrian intellectual traditions
• List of German-language philosophers

Sources

• Będkowski, Marcin, ed. (2020). Formal and Informal Methods in Philosophy. BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-42050-2.
• Brentano, Franz (1973) [1874]. Psychology from An Empirical Standpoint. London: Routledge. ISBN 9780710074256.
• Dummett, Michael (1993). The Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-64473-1.
• Oberman, H. A. (1967). The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism. Baker.
• Rose, Mary Carman (1983). "Foreword to the ROSE Edition". Something About Kierkegaard. By Swenson, David F. Swenson, Lillian Marvin (ed.). (ROSE ed.). Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. pp. xiii–xxiv. ISBN 978-0-86554-084-2. Retrieved 17 March 2025 – via the Internet Archive.
• Vogt, Carl (1874). Physiologische Briefe (in German) (14 ed.). Gießen: Rickersche Buchhandlung.

External links

• Sassen, Brigitte. "German Philosophy in the 18th Century Prior to Kant". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 1095-5054. OCLC 429049174.
• Austrian Philosophy by Barry Smith