German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism
by Terry Pinkard
# Paperback: 392 pages
# Publisher: Cambridge University Press (September 16, 2002)
Published a little more than two years ago, Pinkard's Hegel: A Biography has quickly become the standard life in English of the world's major Romantic-era philosopher, not least because of its magisterial explications of the finer points of Hegel's thought, along with its extremely forthright judiciousness about the life. To have another work from Pinkard, professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, in so short a time is remarkable. Pinkard takes readers-carefully, succinctly and in a manner sensitive to the political and social ferment of the time-on a journey through the most important hundred years in philosophy since the Renaissance. Beginning with the Kantian revolution in human understanding of its own knowledge (the ethical and political consequences that result from it), Pinkard walks readers through the philosophical chaos that reigned through the 1790s, when Hegel was at university with Halderlin and Schelling and the German states were in upheaval, through to Hegel's "completion" of Kant's project (announced with 1807's Phenomenology of Spirit) and Schopenhauer's version of idealism (mirrored in Kierkegaard's pessimism). In Pinkard's hands, what could be just names come alive as men and ideas that have much to teach us about our own beliefs about how to live. As he writes of Hegel's phenomenology, "it was to provide an education, a bildung, a formation for its readership so that they could grasp who they had become (namely, a people individually and collectively `called' to be free), why they had become those people, and why that had been necessary."
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