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Concept
German idealism
Summary
German idealism is 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 Romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment.
The period of German idealism after Kant is also known as post-Kantian idealism or simply post-Kantianism.
One scheme divides German idealists into transcendental idealists, associated with Kant and Fichte, and absolute idealists, associated with Schelling and Hegel.
Idealism
The philosophical meaning of idealism is that those properties we discover in objects are dependent on the way that those objects appear to us. These properties belong to the appearance of objects, and are not necessarily something they possess "in themselves".
Timeline of German idealism
Immanuel Kant's work purports to bridge the two dominant philosophical schools in the 18th century: rationalism, which holds that knowledge could be attained by reason alone a priori (prior to experience), and empiricism, which holds that knowledge could be arrived at only through the senses a posteriori (after experience), as expressed by philosopher David Hume, whose skepticism Kant sought to rebut.
Kant's solution was to propose that, while we depend on objects of experience to know anything about the world, we can investigate a priori the form that our thoughts can take, determining the boundaries of possible experience. Kant calls this approach "critical philosophy". It is less concerned with setting out positive doctrine than with critiquing the limits to the theories we can set out.
There is, however, a positive doctrine: "transcendental idealism", which is distinct from classical idealism and subjective idealism. On this view, the world of appearances is "empirically real and transcendentally ideal." That is, the mind plays a central role in shaping our experience of the world: we perceive phenomena in time and space according to the categories of the understanding.
Official source
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