Anti Idealism

The late 18th century is characterized by two crucial events: the rise of Goethe as a dominating literary figure and the emergence of Kant’s critical philosophy and its productive reception not only in the philosophical but also literary discourse of the time. While the Tübingen School concreatively adopted Kant’s philosophy as a system of ideas, they also critically responded to its intellectualising impulse by positing the equiprimordiality of world and Self, of art and reason. Adhering to the self-critical impulse of Kant’s philosophy by positing the equiprimordiality of both the empirical world and the intelligible subject, and trying to overcome the “chorismos” between them through the classicist model of aesthetic Bildung, they argued for the co-extensiveness of the reality of both philosophy and literature. The authors investigate how the latent antagonism between these divergent traditions of the so-called Goethezeit creates the thrust behind the intellectual firework of divergent literary and philosophical discourses from around 1800, throughout the 19th and into the 20th century.

Do human beings have a special and distinguished place in reality? In Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality Thomas Hofweber contends that they do. We are special since there is an intimate connection between our human minds and reality itself. This book defends a form of idealism which holds that our human minds constrain, but do not construct, reality as the totality of facts. Reality as the totality of facts is thus not independent of our minds, and our minds play a metaphysically special role in all of reality. But reality as the totality of things is taken to be completely independent of us. Hofweber's proposed form of conceptual idealism is formulated via the notion of a harmony between our minds and reality. This harmony is defended through considerations in the philosophy of language. How can one possibly defend a metaphysical thesis like idealism from considerations about our own representation? A key step in the book's argument is to consider a special class of concepts--inescapable concepts--which we cannot rationally replace with different ones. This leads to a new approach for making progress in metaphysics--immanent metaphysics--which is broadly neo-Kantian in spirit.

This landmark book is now reissued in a rewritten & updated edition that takes account of recent Kantian literature. It includes a new discussion of the 'Third Analogy', an expanded discussion of Kant's 'Paralogisms' & new chapters on Kant's theory of reason, theology & the 'Appendix to the Dialectic'.

Idealism is the view that reality is fundamentally mental. Idealism has been influential historically, but it has been neglected in contemporary metaphysical debate. This volume of 17 essays by leading philosophers rectifies the situation.

Embodied Idealism argues that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's early thought - primarily as found in The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception - stands as a form of transcendental idealism. This interpretation runs against the grain of much of the Merleau-Ponty scholarship, and opposing interpretations are not without support. Merleau-Ponty is at points highly critical of idealism in his early works. Also, his emphasis on embodiment would seem to run counter to the idealist view that the mental is central to reality. Joseph Berendzen shows that these points can be accommodated within a transcendental idealist interpretation. Merleau-Ponty's overt criticisms of idealism are aimed at specific aspects of idealist theories that are not obligatory aspects of idealism in general. Rather, his critique is typically aimed at a specific version of intellectualist idealism associated with his teacher Léon Brunschvicg. In spite of his overt criticisms of idealism, Merleau-Ponty's early philosophy holds that our experience is inextricably structured by our minds. Furthermore, he holds that reality is ontologically dependent on the mind, yet in a manner that also allows for a sense in which reality is mind-independent. It is crucial to this interpretation that Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on embodiment leads to a unique view of embodied consciousness and subjectivity that supports a novel form of idealism, rather than motivating an anti-idealist position. Thus, his transcendental idealism is genuinely an embodied idealism.

Peace Corps volunteers seem to exemplify the desire to make the world a better place. Yet despite being one of history’s clearest cases of organized idealism, the Peace Corps has, in practice, ended up cultivating very different outcomes among its volunteers. By the time they return from the Peace Corps, volunteers exhibit surprising shifts in their political and professional consciousness. Rather than developing a systemic perspective on development and poverty, they tend instead to focus on individual behavior; they see professions as the only legitimate source of political and social power. They have lost their idealism, and their convictions and beliefs have been reshaped along the way. The Death of Idealism uses the case of the Peace Corps to explain why and how participation in a bureaucratic organization changes people’s ideals and politics. Meghan Elizabeth Kallman offers an innovative institutional analysis of the role of idealism in development organizations. She details the combination of social forces and organizational pressures that depoliticizes Peace Corps volunteers, channels their idealism toward professionalization, and leads to cynicism or disengagement. Kallman sheds light on the structural reasons for the persistent failure of development organizations and the consequences for the people involved. Based on interviews with over 140 current and returned Peace Corps volunteers, field observations, and a large-scale survey, this deeply researched, theoretically rigorous book offers a novel perspective on how people lose their idealism, and why that matters.

Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess philosophers after him in light of their responses to Kantian idealism. In Continental Idealism, Paul Redding argues that the story of German idealism begins with Leibniz. Redding begins by examining Leibniz's dispute with Newton over the nature of space, time and God, and stresses the way in which Leibniz incorporated Platonic and Aristotelian elements in his distinctive brand of idealism. Redding shows how Kant's interpretation of Leibniz's views of space and time consequently shaped his own 'transcendental' version of idealism. Far from ending here, however, Redding argues that post-Kantian idealists such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel on the one hand and metaphysical sceptics such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the other continued to wrestle with a form of idealism ultimately derived from Leibniz. Continental Idealism offers not only a new picture of one of the most important philosophical movements in the history of philosophy, but also a valuable and clear introduction to the origins of Continental and European philosophy.