Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism Book

As the title suggests, this text offers an excellent array of philosophy that exemplifies the development of post-Kantian idealism in Germany.

The book is divided into two parts, the first of which follows the reception of Kant's work (the first Critique in particular), and provides a diverse exemplification of how Kant's works were (mis)understood and (mis)interpreted, and how these factors were essential to the shaping of the idealist tradition that gave birth to Hegel and Schelling. The review by Fichte is the high point of this section, gesturing towards his Wissenschaftlehre. The rest of the texts were marginally interesting, though for the most part are unimportant outside of their historical influence upon the more widely remembered figures of this tradition.

The second section of this work is devoted to some writings from Schelling and Hegel's Critical Journal, and is thus oriented farther away from Kant, towards the thinking of these later figures who are highly indebted to his speculative revolution. These texts offer insight into the progression and metamorphic co-influence that the thoughts of Hegel and of Schelling were having upon one another, and how this intellectual friendship charted the course for their later works (especially setting the inital stages for Hegel's Phenomenology). I found Hegel's piece on Skepticism and Schelling's on the Philosophy of Nature to be of the most interest and value. Each evinces much influence of the other's thought upon its author, to the point where authority is ungrounded and rendered nearly inoperative. Hegel and Schelling are disidentified, not in oblivion, but through a sublation which inscribes a negative progression towards an Absolute in language. Of course, this Absolute remains faulted, broken, and at times mistaken. It has not reached its end, which is infinite - it remains seperated from itself, severed from its absoluteness, and thus at once determined and divested of its status as Absolute.

If you are interested in any of the proper names that have been written above in any partially serious manner then this book is an interesting and worthwhile read, helping to fill an often obscured gap in the historical progression of the German Geist under the far too often misunderstood guise of Idealism. If nothing else, this volume helps to clear up the inanity of this common misunderstanding concerning Idealism and its relation to reality.