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

Carolingian manuscript, c. 831. Rabanus Maurus (left), with Alcuin (middle), dedicating his work to Archbishop Otgar of Mainz (right)

While Saint Ambrose (c. 339 – 397) was born in modern-day Germany, German philosophy starts much later.

Medieval philosophy was often Christian philosophy. 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."

Illumination from Scivias showing Hildegard von Bingen receiving a vision.

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 (1151), 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. Italian philosopher Peter Lombard, author of the Sentences (c. 1150), was also influenced by Hugh of Saint Victor.

Albertus Magnus

The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Albert the Great by Vicente Salvador Gomez (c. 1660)

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 philosophical topics. 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.

Meister Eckhart in a posthumous portrait by Andrea di Bonaiuto (c. 1366)

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, as well as the later Lambertus de Monte (c. 1430–1499). 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 the Neoplatonic mysticism of Theodoric with the non-philosophical mysticism found among female orders, such as that of Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207–c. 1282), author of The Flowing Light of the Godhead. Albertist Berthold of Moosburg (d. c. 1365) succeeded Eckhart at Cologne. Eckhart was posthumously condemned for heresy in 1329, and was defended by Henry Suso (1295 – 1366). Johannes Tauler (c. 1300 – 1361) held similar views.

Modistae

Thomas of Erfurt (fl. c. 1300) was the most influential of the Aristotelian so called modistae or speculative grammarians active in Northern Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. They opposed nominalism and argued for philosophical realism.

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, especially through later figures such as scholastic philosopher Gabriel Biel (c. 1420–1495), the first professor of theology at the University of Tübingen in 1484.

Albrecht Dürer's Portrait of Erasmus (1526)

The Schism of 1378 drove many nominalist teachers from France to Germany. The first university in the Holy Roman Empire was the University of Prague (1347), modeled after the University of Paris, then influenced by French Ockhamist Jean Buridan (c. 1301–c. 1359). Albert of Saxony (c. 1320–1390), a student of Buridan, contributed to logic, and to physics with a theory of impetus, a precursor to inertia. He became the first rector at the second, the University of Vienna (1365). Albert was followed at Vienna by Heinrich of Hainbuch (c. 1325–1397) who taught Ockham's conciliar theory. Albert's student Marsilius of Inghen (c. 1340–1396) became first rector at the third, the University of Heidelberg (1386). The Dominican Cologne was converted into a studium generale (c. 1388) and was the fourth.

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, along with Conrad Celtis (1459–1508).

Cusa portrait by the Master of Wilten (c. 1480)

Cusa was a student of Heymeric de Campo, and a mystic who believed in the coincidentia oppositorum, suggesting Cusa was a dialetheist, one who denies the law of non-contradiction. Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia (Of Learned Ignorance) (1440) 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 skeptic and 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 (1511) and Handbook of a Christian Knight (1501).

Another humanist was Johann Heynlin (c. 1425–1496), 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 (1497–1560), 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 (1524), arguing for free will and synergism. Following sudden, violent, iconoclastic rioting in the city of Basel in early 1529, led by Œcolampadius (1482–1531), 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.

Ramist and follower of Melanchthon Rudolph Goclenius (1547– 1628) taught Otto Casmann (1562– 1607), a humanist convert to Protestantism who attempted Mosaic physics.

Hermeticism

Portrait of Paracelsus by Augustin Hirschvogel

Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516) was a humanist and mystic hermeticist who taught Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535) and Paracelsus (1493–1541).

Nettesheim was influenced by Albertists and Erasmus. His Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) was widely influential among esotericists, and was condemned as heretical by the inquisitor of Cologne. He also proved influential for his skepticism, found in On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Arts and Sciences: An Invective Declamation (1530).

Paracelsus was an alchemist and a 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. Gerhard Dorn (c. 1530 – 1584), Oswald Croll (c. 1563–1609), Heinrich Khunrath (c. 1560–1605), and Valentin Weigel (1533–1588) helped popularize his work.

Valentin Weigel also followed religious radicals Sebastian Franck (1499–c. 1543) and Caspar Schwenckfeldt (c. 1490–1561) who believed Christ could be known internally, without reading. Pietist predecessor Johann Arndt (1555–1621) and Pietist Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714) helped to spread Valentin Weigel's ideas.

17th century

Copernican Revolution

Kepler's Platonic solid model of the Solar System, from Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596)

Melanchthon taught the Wittenberg interpretation of Copernicus and influenced Protestants like mathematician Philipp Apian, who taught Michael Maestlin, who introduced Copernicus to Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). Kepler was a natural philosopher and a key figure in the Scientific Revolution. He is best known for supporting heliocentrism and his laws of planetary motion, found in such books as Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae.

He also wrote the Rudolphine Tables (1627), based on the data and measurements of Dane Tycho Brahe (1546–1601). In Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596) Kepler proposed that the distance relationships between the six planets known at that time could be understood in terms of the five Platonic solids, showing the influence of Plato's Timaeus.

Böhme

Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), the Lutheran mystic philosopher, was influenced by Valentin Weigel. Böhme founded Christian theosophy and his school of thought is known as Behmenism. Böhme wrote The Way to Christ (1624). A key concept for Böhme is the Ungrund, the primeval abyss before the creation of the world, but that is also a will and pure freedom.

Cartesianism

Johannes Clauberg was a defender of Cartesianism, the views of "father of modern philosophy" René Descartes (1596–1650). Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680) was one of the first to pose the interaction problem for substance dualism to 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 (1632–1677), 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," in which conclusions are produced by applying reason to first principles or definitions rather than to empirical evidence. Leibniz believed reason is governed by the law of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason. The work of Leibniz anticipated modern logic and analytic philosophy, but his philosophy also looks back to the scholastic tradition. His early philosophy is found in the Discourse on Metaphysics (1686).

Leibniz is noted for his optimism – his Théodicée (1710) 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 (1714). They can be compared to the corpuscles of the mechanical philosophy of Descartes, except for Descartes objects are merely extended in space, while Leibniz agreed with the scholastics that objects have substantial forms. 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.

A heavy influence on the Enlightenment was the work of British natural philosopher Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) and his philosophy of Newtonianism. Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1686), which included his laws of motion, introducing classical mechanics in physics. Leibniz and Newton disputed who had invented calculus. Leibniz and Newton also disagreed on space, with Leibniz being a relationist.

German philosophy at this time saw a number of occasionalists, those who hold the view that only God causes things. The occasionalists were Leibniz teacher Erhard Weigel (1625–1699), and Descartes and Leibniz critic Johann Sturm (1635–1703). Erhard Weigel was also a teacher of Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694).

18th century

Enlightenment

Pufendorf's follower was Christian Thomasius (1655–1728). Thomasius is commonly seen as the start of the German Enlightenment (Aufklärung).

Wolff

Christian Wolff

Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was the most eminent German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant. Leibniz and Wolff are often grouped together as the “Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy”. Wolff's rationalism was criticized by the Pietists at the University of Halle like Philipp Spener (1635–1705) and August Hermann Francke (1663–1727).

Wolff was interested in what he called both theoretical and practical philosophy, which includes economics and public administration. His main achievement was a complete oeuvre on almost every scholarly subject of his time, displayed according to his demonstrative-deductive, mathematical method, which perhaps represents the peak of Enlightenment rationality in Germany. Wolff was both one of the first to use German as a language for scholarship, and a writer in Latin, so that an international audience read him.

Wolff, and his student and Tübingen logician Gottfried Ploucquet (1716–1790), were originally occasionalists, but eventually abandoned the view. Georg Bernhard Bilfinger (1693–1750) and Israel Gottlieb Canz (1690–1753) were also Wolff followers at Tübingen. August Friedrich Bök (1739–1815) was a student of Ploucquet. Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) further developed the logic of Ploucquet.

Art theorists Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) and Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–1777) were students of Wolff. Baumgarten coined the term aesthetics, and influenced Aufklärer Thomas Abbt (1738–1766).

Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was a German-Jewish philosopher of the Haskalah, or 'Jewish Enlightenment', who wrote Phaedon (1767), a defense of immortality resulting from the death of Thomas Abbt. Scholar Allan Arkush describes Mendelssohn as “the last great representative of the Leibniz-Wolffian school”.

Lessing

A German Enlightenment advocate admired by Abbt was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781). Lessing advocated religious tolerance, for instance in his play Nathan the Wise (1779). Lessing said there was an "ugly, broad ditch" between the "accidental truths of history" and "the necessary truths of reason".

Kant

Immanuel Kant

Königsberg University professor Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) published his elaborate philosophy of transcendental idealism in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). 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.

Kant was a Pietist who tried to establish the limits of knowledge “in order to make room for faith”. Kant also published the Prolegomena (1783), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of Judgment (1790). The Critique of Practical Reason has Kant's deontological ethics, with the categorical imperative; and a moral argument for God, free will, and the immortality of the soul. There was also Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and The Metaphysics of Morals (1797). The Critique of Judgment contains Kant's aesthetics and philosophy of art, including his views on the beautiful (German: Schönheit) and the sublime (Das Erhabene).

1755 copper engraving showing Lisbon in flames and a tsunami overwhelming the ships in the harbor

Kant was a student of Wolff follower Martin Knutzen (1713–1751), who introduced Kant to Newton's philosophy. Kant was also a major advocate of the Enlightenment who wrote Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784) 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 (1798).

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 with both 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).

1789 was the year of the French Revolution. The 19th century in Germany saw the Napoleonic Wars, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and the Unification of Germany led by Otto von Bismarck following the Franco-Prussian War (1870).

Following the revolutions of 1830, Heinrich Heine wrote On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1834), attacking Madame de Staël's book De l'Allemagne (1813) and hoping to inspire revolution. The period preceding the revolutions of 1848, the Vormärz and Biedermeier era, saw the end of the Romantic era.

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 (1759), 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 (1772). 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, and the namesake of the Goethe-Institut. He was also a part of the Weimar Classicism movement. Goethe developed a friendship with Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). Schiller's teacher was Jacob Friedrich von Abel (1751 – 1829) of Tübingen.

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), 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 (1767–1845), Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and August Ludwig Hülsen (1765–1809).

Hülsen was a platonic realist. 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.

Fichte

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814)

As a representative of subjective idealism, Fichte rejected the Kantian "thing-in-itself." Fichte in works like The Vocation of Man (1799) 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. He was a protégé of von Abel. According to Hegel’s system of absolute idealism, reality is dialectical, always in motion and contradictory. Its activity can be expressed only in thinking, in self-knowledge.

Hegel presents the dialectical process of self-development in three main stages in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which are ordered conceptually, not temporally. The first stage is logical, and describes the "pre-natural" state in the "element of pure thinking." At this stage, the "absolute idea" appears as a system of logical concepts and categories. This part of Hegel's philosophical system is set forth in his Science of Logic (1812–1816). At the second stage, the "idea" is considered "in its externality" as nature. Hegel expounded his doctrine of nature in the Philosophy of Nature entry from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817). 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. The highest stage of spirit is presented as in the forms of art, religion, and philosophy. 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 Lectures on the Philosophy of History and Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821) contain Hegel's political philosophy.

Jacobi

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) debated the pantheism controversy with Moses Mendelssohn, a result of Lessing privately avowing Spinozism. Also, Fichte was accused of atheism, and in the atheism dispute, Jacobi further explicated his view 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.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was influenced by Jacobi and is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. Kierkegaard believed religion required a leap of faith. According to György Lukács, Kierkegaard's views on philosophy and aesthetics were also an offshoot of Romanticism.

Reinhold

Karl Leonhard Reinhold was one of the best known popularizers of Kant with his Letters on the Kantian Philosophy. 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.

Reinhold influenced Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802–1872), who defended Aristotelian philosophy and teleology.

Hegelianism

Hegel was hugely influential throughout the nineteenth century. Among those influenced by Hegel immediately after his death, 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.

Right 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.

The Right Hegelians included Karl Daub (1765–1836), Hermann Friedrich Wilhelm Hinrichs (1794–1861), Leopold von Henning (1791–1866), and Heinrich Gustav Hotho (1802–1873).

Speculative theism

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.

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 (1832–1888).

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 rejection 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. They rejected anti-utopian aspects of his thought that "Old Hegelians" had interpreted to mean the world had already essentially reached perfection. They included Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), David Strauss (1808–1874), Bruno Bauer (1809–1882) and Max Stirner (1806–1856) among their ranks.

Feuerbach wrote The Essence of Christianity (1841), 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. 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.

The materialism controversy was also challenging conventions. 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."

Marx and Engels

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a Young Hegelian who incorporated French socialism and British economic theory. He transformed the three into an essential work of economics called Das Kapital, a critical 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, was a friend and associate of Marx, together with whom he wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848). Marx and Engels developed the criticism of private property, theory of class struggle and scientific socialism (communism), and the doctrines of dialectical and historical materialism rather than German idealism. As they wrote in the posthumously published The German Ideology (1932), "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 in 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 (1888), 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 scientific socialism, Dialectics of Nature (1883) applying Marxism to science, and The Origin of the Family (1884) arguing that the family is an ever-changing institution that has been shaped by capitalism.

Dühring

Eugen Dühring

Engels dedicated his entire book Anti-Dühring (1878) to criticizing Dühring's views. Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) 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 (1850–1932).

Dietzgen

Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888) was a German leatherworker and social democrat, who independently 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 philosophy, political economy and socialism. He wrote a large philosophical treatise, The Essence of the Mental Labor of Man, a review of the first volume of Das Kapital. 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.

Academic socialism

The Kathedersozialismus movement (academic socialism) was a trend in German universities in the second half of the 19th century. 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 Bismarck’s welfare state. The most notable advocates in Germany were Bruno Hildebrand (1812–1878), who was openly against Marx and Engels, Gustav von Schmoller (1838–1917), Adolph Wagner (1835–1917), Lujo Brentano (1844–1931), Johann Plenge (1874–1963), Hans Delbrück (1848–1929), Ferdinand Toennies (1855–1936) and Werner Sombart (1863–1941). In the labor movement in Germany, their line was supported by Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864).

Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer, a pessimist philosopher

Arthur Schopenhauer was an opponent of Hegel's thought. He was taught by Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761–1833), 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 followed Kant but concluded that we have access to one certain aspect of the thing-in-itself, by introspective observation of our own bodies. 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. Schopenhauer also thought art could alleviate suffering.

Towards the end of Schopenhauer's life and in the years after his death, post-Schopenhauerian pessimism became a rather popular trend. Nevertheless, it was viewed with disdain by other popular philosophies at the time. In an age of revolution and science, the resigned nature of the typical pessimist was seen as detriment to social development. A group of philosophers greatly influenced by Schopenhauer responded to this growing criticism, such as Julius Bahnsen (1830–1881), Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), Philipp Mainländer (1841–1876).

Mainländer

Much like Schopenhauer, Mainländer sees the will as the first principle. However, he deviates from Schopenhauer in important respects. With Schopenhauer, the will is singular, unified and beyond time and space. Mainländer instead believed in pluralism.

Additionally, Mainländer believes in the idea of salvation for all of creation. 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 The World as Will and Representation, as well as by other 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 also 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.

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) became the leader of Marburg School, the other prominent representatives of which were realist Paul Natorp (1844–1924) and Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945). Another important group, the Southwest (German) School (also known as the Heidelberg School or Baden School, centered in Heidelberg, Baden in Southwest Germany) included Lotze student Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), realist Alois Riehl (1844–1924), Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), and Emil Lask (1875–1915). Windelband was an influence on sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), best known as author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).

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 (1882–1927), established the Göttingen-based neo-Friesian School which emphasized philosophy of science.

The end of the 19th century saw the psychologism dispute (German: Psychologismusstreit). Psychologism was defended by Theodor Lipps (1851–1914), Dutch panpsychist Gerardus Heymans (1857–1930), psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), pragmatist Wilhelm Jerusalem (1854–1923), logician Christoph von Sigwart (1830–1904), Theodor Elsenhans (1862–1918), and Benno Erdmann (1851–1921).

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 (1885) and The Gay Science (1882), 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 (1887), Nietzsche gives a genealogical critique of Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality. He continues the polemic against Christianity in The Antichrist (1895).

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 (1833–1911) was a student of Trendelenburg and is the founder, along with Nietzsche, Georg Simmel (1858–1918), and Ludwig Klages (1872–1956), of the intuitionist and irrationalist school of Lebensphilosophie in Germany. 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 vitalistic interpretation of Hegel was influential in the post-war period; his vitalistic interpretation of Goethe likewise led from Simmel and Friedrich Gundolf (1880–1931) to Klages. Dilthey and Simmel were an influence on Martin Buber (1878–1965), the existentialist writer of I and Thou (1923).

Mach and Avenarius

Ernst Mach

Ernst Mach (1838–1916) 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,” a kind of phenomenology denying the existence of an external world independent of human consciousness. Mach also believed in the "economy of thought," that all metaphysical elements are to be eliminated as superfluous. Mach was a relationist like Leibniz.

Richard Avenarius

The philosophy of Machism found support among Western European Marxists such as Friedrich Adler (1879–1960) and Otto Bauer (1881–1938), 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 (1843–1896) was 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 (1870–1924) 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. It is notable for influencing both analytic and continental philosophy.

In Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), Trendelenburg student and 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.

Alexius Meinong

The School of Brentano included Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Alexius Meinong (1853–1920). 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 (1859–1932) is known as one of the founders and precursors of Gestalt psychology. The Berlin School of experimental psychology was founded by Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), a student of Brentano and Lotze.

The Polish Lwów–Warsaw school, founded by Kazimierz Twardowski (1866–1938), was also influenced by Brentano. Twardowski emphasized "small philosophy", or the detailed, systematic analysis of specific problems.

Husserl, Meinong, and Twardowski were further influenced by the Bohemian logical realist Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848). Bolzano foreshadowed analytic philosophy with talk of propositions, but in Kantian language, "sentences-in-themselves".

20th century

The 20th century saw German philosophy influence both the major schools of thought of the analytic and continental traditions. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) are considered two of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

The 20th century also notably saw the defeat of Imperial Germany in World War I, the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, and the subsequent Cold War, until the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

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 (1884–1974), Siegfried Marck, Arthur Liebert, and Hermann Glöckner (1889–1987).

Spengler

Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was a German historian and philosopher of history influenced by Goethe and Nietzsche. The main work of Spengler's is The Decline of the West, published shortly after World War I. In this work, Spengler predicts the inevitable collapse of European civilization.

Spengler’s philosophy of history is based on analogy and the denial of scientific knowledge. Spengler contrasts the scientific understanding of natural historical development with historical fatalism – predestination, “destiny.” 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.

Spengler opposes whig history and adopts something more like a cyclical history. He rejects the concept of historical progress, and tries to prove the meaninglessness of history and the absence of development in it.

Spengler denies the unity of world history. He instead proposes an organic theory of history. Spengler sees history as a number of 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,” 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, with the victory of capitalism.

So the period of its heyday was the era of feudalism. 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.”

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 Adolf 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

Alfred Baeumler

The 20th century saw the culmination of Hitler's rise to power and Nazi Germany's combination of anti-semitism, nationalism and socialism from 1933 to 1945. Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), who published The Concept of the Political (1932), joined the Nazi Party. So did Martin Heidegger, who took the vow of allegiance.

The best known work of Nazi philosophy was The Myth of the 20th Century by Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), which said soul was race seen from within. It was awarded the State Prize for Art and Science for 1937. 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 (1887–1968), 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 (1882–1947).

By 1933, the various neo-Kantian circles in Germany had dispersed. The Nazis also expelled both the analytic Vienna Circle and the continental Frankfurt School, entrenching them in American philosophy.

Analytic philosophy

Gottlob Frege

Gottlob Frege

In the late 19th century, the predicate logic of University 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 the "linguistic turn" and 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 (1845–1918) and Richard Dedekind (1831–1916), and argued for mathematical platonism and against psychologism in works like The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884). In the philosophy of language, Frege advocated a mediated reference theory in his paper On Sense and Reference (1892), and for platonism about propositions in the article Thought (1918).

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 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 (1882–1936) and included Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) and Otto Neurath (1882–1945). The closely related Berlin Circle was led by Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) and included Carl Hempel (1905–1997) and mathematician David Hilbert (1862–1943). There was also the Dutch signific circle, which included L. E. J. Brouwer (1881–1966), founder of intuitionistic logic. Schlick was murdered by a former student, Johann Nelböck, in 1936.

Later Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein then had a radical break with his early philosophy, as exemplified by the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953).

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 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. Phenomenology has had a large influence on continental philosophy, particularly existentialism and poststructuralism. Max Scheler (1874–1928) further developed the philosophical method of phenomenology.

Edmund Husserl

Husserl was a follower of Brentano and Stumpf teaching at the University of Göttingen. Husserl's psychologism in Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) was responded to by Frege, and Husserl subsequently changed his mind, joining Frege as a platonist by refuting psychologism in his Logical Investigations (1901). Husserl's other best known work on phenomenology is the Cartesian Meditations (1931). Husserl advocates bracketing to focus on experience and achieve eidetic reduction. He influenced Lipps students like Adolf Reinach, a casualty of World War I who started Munich phenomenology.

Martin Heidegger

Phenomenology was transformed by Martin Heidegger, whose magnum opus Being and Time (1927) applied phenomenology to ontology and discussed the metaphysics of presence. Heidegger is notable for such concepts as Dasein, the consciousness particular to people of "being there", and "thrownness" the feeling of being thrown into the world.

Heidegger famously gave up "philosophy" in his later life, preferring the term "thinking". According to W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz, Heidegger, in works like his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), believed "the thinking of Heraclitus and Parmenides, which lies at the origin of philosophy, was falsified and misinterpreted" by Plato and Aristotle, thus tainting all of subsequent Western philosophy.

Hermeneutics

Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

Theodor Adorno

In 1923, Carl Grünberg founded the Institute for Social Research, drawing from neo-Hegelianism, 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.
• Korab-Karpowicz, W. Julian (2016). The Presocratics in the Thought of Martin Heidegger. Peter Lang. ISBN 978-3631712917.
• 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