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With the publication of Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851, there finally came some measure of the fame that Schopenhauer thought was his due. Described by Schopenhauer himself as 'incomparably more popular than everything up till now', Parerga is a miscellany of essays addressing themes that complement his work The World as Will and Representation, along with more divergent, speculative pieces. It includes essays on method, logic, the intellect, Kant, pantheism, natural science, religion, education, and language. The present volume offers a new translation, a substantial introduction explaining the context of the essays, and extensive editorial notes on the different published versions of the work. This readable and scholarly edition will be an essential reference for those studying Schopenhauer, the history of philosophy, and nineteenth-century German philosophy.

Introductory remark Both the intellectual glory and the political misery of the Germans may be traced back to one and the same cause: German civilisation is considerably younger than the civilisation of the West. The Germans are, strictly speaking, less civilized than the English and the French, i.e., they are to a lesser degree citizens, free citizens. This is one aspect of the matter. The other aspect is that German philosophy is more apt to take a critical attitude towards civilisation, towards the tradition of civilisations, than Western philosophy is. We may go so far as to say that, generally speaking, German philosophy implies a more or less radical criticism of the very idea of civilisation and especially of modern civilisation – a criticism disastrous in the political field, but necessary in the philosophical, in the theoretical field. For if civilisation is distinguished from, and even opposed to, what was formerly called the state of nature, the process of civilisation means an increasing going away from the natural condition of man, an increasing forgetting of that situation. And perhaps one must have a living knowledge, an acute recollection of that situation if one wants to know, i.e. to understand in its full meaning, the natural , the basic problems of philosophy.

The first study of its kind, The Impact of Idealism assesses the impact of classical German philosophy on science, religion and culture. This volume explores German Idealism's impact on philosophy and scientific thought. Fourteen essays, by leading authorities in their respective fields, each focus on the legacy of a particular idea that emerged around 1800, when the underlying concepts of modern philosophy were being formed, challenged and criticised, leaving a legacy that extends to all physical areas and all topics in the philosophical world. From British Idealism to phenomenology, existentialism, pragmatism and French postmodernism, the story of German Idealism's impact on philosophy is here interwoven with man's scientific journey of self-discovery in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – from Darwin to Nietzsche to Freud and beyond. Spanning the analytical and Continental divide, this first volume examines Idealism's impact on contemporary philosophical discussions.

espanolEl idealismo aleman empezo con Leibniz y duro hasta Schopenhauer, con unas cuantas replicas sismicas en Europa central en la obra de Husserl y sus seguidores. La gran epoca en la filosofia alemana coincidio con una gran epoca en la musica alemana. No es muy sorprendente, entonces, que los filosofos idealistas hayan puesto atencion especial en esta forma de arte. En retrospectiva ?hay en este encuentro prolongado entre la musica y la filosofia algo que podriamos considerar como avance real y del cual podriamos sacar provecho? Hay muchos que asi lo pensaron, no por ultimo, porque el idealismo, conforme maduro en el periodo posterior a Kant, heredo la adulacion del arte en general y de la musica en particular, que encontramos en los escritos de los romanticos alemanes, en particular en Schiller, Tieck y Wackenroder. Los idealistas post-kantianos conectaron la experiencia estetica con su reclamo de revelar el significado secreto de las cosas, en el infinito, lo absoluto, lo transcendental, lo inefable o algun otro objeto similar de una devocion casi religiosa. Algo asi encontramos en los escritos de Schelling, Fichte, Hegel y Schopenhauer, este ultimo convirtiendo la musica no solo en un objeto de la filosofia, sino en el ejemplo principal de la misma. La musica no es, escribio Schopenhauer, aritmetica inconsciente, segun habia afirmado Leibniz, sin filosofia inconsciente, puesto que en la musica se hace presente directamente para el intelecto la esencia interna del mundo, que es la voluntad. EnglishGerman Idealism began with Leibniz and lasted until Schopenhauer, with a few central European after-shocks in the work of Husserl and his followers. That great epoch in German philosophy coincided with a great epoch in German music. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that Idealist philosophers should have paid special attention to this art form. Looking back on it, is there anything of this prolonged encounter between music and philosophy that we can consider to be a real advance, and one that we should draw on? Many have thought so, not least because Idealism, as it matured in the post-Kantian period, inherited the adulation for art in general, and music in particular, that we find in the writings of the German Romantics, notably in Schiller, Tieck and Wackenroder. The post-Kantian Idealists connected aesthetic experience with their claims to reveal the secret meaning of things, in the infinite, the absolute, the transcendental, the ineffable or some other such object of a quasi-religious devotion. Such we find in the writings of Schelling, Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer, the last of whom made music not only an object of philosophy, but a prime example of it. Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the intellect.

I. To speak of ‘the legacy of Idealism’ is to combine two terms neither of which is unproblematic. The term ‘legacy’ was long compromised through discussion within the GDR of the maintenance of its cultural traditions; but these days it seems, particularly in a philosophical context, that once more it can be used in a fairly unembarrassed way (as is shown for example by Hegels Erbe ( Hegel's Legacy ), the book of essays edited by Halbig, Quante and Siep in 2004). My concern here will not be with the reconstruction of the influence of individual thinkers, but with their connections with one another, with the intellectual force field to which Dieter Henrich has given the name ‘constellations’ ( Konstellationen ). Within a very short time, in the two decades at the end of the eighteenth century, the structure of speculative Idealism arose. It shaped intellectual history and even today it sets a benchmark for philosophical thought – comparable only with what was achieved in the classical period of Athens and Florence. According to Rudiger Bubner, in the introduction to Innovationen des Idealismus (1995, published in English as The Innovations of Idealism , 2003), we have today become accustomed to seeing German Idealism as more than simply a particularly inspiring period in the history of philosophy. And despite increasing chronological distance, we regard idealism as exemplary because of its quick awareness of problems, intensive movements of ideas and prudent, which is to say, undogmatic formation of a political rationality. Yet despite all the sustained interest in this philosophical epoch, it remains enormously difficult to agree what constitutes German Idealism at its core. Historically we have become accustomed to distinguish two phases of development: the critical phase and the speculative phase that followed it. But it is frequently pointed out, inter alia in Walter Jaeschke's inaugural lecture, that talk of ‘German Idealism’ is, for various reasons, not suited to be the name of an epoch, and that, in contrast, it would be preferable to speak of ‘classical German philosophy’.

The beginning of the Transcendental Dialectic marks an important transition in the Critique of Pure Reason and in Kant's philosophical system as a whole. In approximately the first half of the Critique , Kant argues that we can have immanent metaphysical knowledge of synthetic a priori principles that structure all possible human experience, because they are grounded in our pure forms of intuition (space and time) and the pure concepts of our understanding (the categories). But Kant's argument for this immanent metaphysics rests on his claim that human knowledge can result only from applying concepts to intuitions, or more precisely to schemata mediating the application of concepts to appearances. This key claim implies that transcendent metaphysical knowledge - knowledge of objects that transcend the boundaries of possible human experience - is impossible for us, since it would involve deploying concepts independently of intuitions or schemata. If Kant had ended the Critique at this point, then his positive argument for an immanent metaphysics in the first half of the book would be wide open to attack from those unwilling to accept its strong negative implication that transcendent metaphysics is impossible. But as Kant was well aware, the Leibniz-Wolffian tradition that dominated German philosophy in the eighteenth century held that transcendent metaphysics is not only possible but actual.

On three occasions in the Critique of Pure Reason , Kant takes credit for having finally provided the proof of the “principle of sufficient reason” that his predecessors in post-Leibnizian German philosophy had sought in vain. They could not provide such a proof, he says, because they lacked the transcendental method of the Critique of Pure Reason . According to this method, one proves the truth of a synthetic a priori principle (for instance, the causal principle) by proving two things: (1) that the conditions of possibility of our experience of an object are also the conditions of possibility of this object itself (this is the argument Kant makes in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories); (2) that presupposing the truth of the synthetic principle under consideration (for instance, the causal principle, but also all the other “principles of pure understanding”) is a condition of possibility of our experience of any object, and therefore (by virtue of [1]), of this object itself. What Kant describes as his “proof of the principle of sufficient reason” is none other than his proof, according to this method, of the causal principle in the Second Analogy of Experience, in the Critique of Pure Reason (cf. A200–1/B246–7, A217/B265, A783/B811). Now this claim is somewhat surprising. In Leibniz, and in Christian Wolff – the main representative of the post-Leibnizian school of German philosophy discussed by Kant – the causal principle is only one of the specifications of the principle of sufficient reason.

The Persistence of Subjectivity examines several approaches to, and critiques of, the core notion in the self-understanding and legitimation of the modern, 'bourgeois' form of life: the free, reflective, self-determining subject. Since it is a relatively recent historical development that human beings think of themselves as individual centers of agency, and that one's entitlement to such a self-determining life is absolutely valuable, the issue at stake also involves the question of the historical location of philosophy. What might it mean to take seriously Hegel's claim that philosophical reflection is always reflection on the historical 'actuality' of its own age? Discussing Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Leo Strauss, Manfred Frank, and John McDowell, Robert Pippin attempts to understand how subjectivity arises in contemporary institutional practices such as medicine, as well as in other contexts such as modernism in the visual arts and in the novels of Marcel Proust.

Kantianism In 1781, Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason , delivered the bad news that the human mind can (even worse, must) pose important, unavoidable philosophical questions that it cannot possibly answer. These were distinct, perennial philosophical questions answerable, if at all, by pure reason alone, independent of any appeal to experience. (Kant thought the most important ones concerned freedom, the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul, but the scope of his critique also extended to issues such as the nature of the mind, the human good, the purpose of nature, or any attempt to know “things in themselves.”) While, according to Kant, we could at least settle once and for all just what those limits to knowledge were and why we were not able to cross such a boundary, that seemed small consolation. Metaphysics, the “queen of the sciences,” had understood itself as capable of knowing how things must be or could not be, and so had prided itself on the certainty of its claims and on a rigor in its method rivaled only by mathematics. So it was not for nothing that Kant became known as the “all-destroying.” The skeptical sentiment expressed in Kant's critical work was not, of course, isolated in Konigsberg. The latter half of the eighteenth century can be viewed as a collective debate about the nature and even future of rationalist philosophy, or philosophy as it had come to be understood since Plato (especially as the impact and advances of Newtonian physics were more and more felt) and about the right way to state the principles underlying an ever more popular empiricism.

The wise man as astronomer: As long as you feel the stars to be “above” you, you do not gaze as one who has insight. Friedrich Nietzsche Two Rivers The category “continental philosopher” is the popular term for many of the figures covered in this chapter. In a way, the roots of continental philosophy stretch back to the rift described at the end of Chapter 5 between those thinkers who are loosely associated with the romantic movement and those associated with Kant. Intellectuals such as Jacobi rejected the Enlightenment dream of a critical philosophy founded on reason. Frederick Beiser effectively states the process of how an Enlightenment ideal devolved. The context of German philosophy toward the close of the eighteenth century was dominated by one long-standing cultural crisis: the decline of the Aufklarung , the German Enlightenment. This crisis threw into question its main article of faith: the sovereignty of reason. The Aufklarung was the German “age of reason,” or, since reason was conceived as a critical power, “the age of criticism.” The Aufklarung gave reason complete sovereignty because it claimed that reason could criticize all of our beliefs, accepting or rejecting them strictly according to whether there is sufficient evidence for them … such was the bold programme – and dream – of the Aufklarung . Tragically, though, it carried the seeds of its own destruction. Simply to state its principle of the sovereignty of reason is to raise grave questions about it. For if reason must criticize everything on heaven and earth, must it not also criticize itself?[…]