Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche Book

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction 1

1 The Seventeenth-Century Background to the Emergence of Continental Idealism 6

1.1 Early-modern theology and natural philosophy 6

1.2 Henry More and Newtonian "spiritualism" 9

1.3 Leibniz, Clarke and Berkeley on space and God 12

2 The Monadological World of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 20

2.1 Leibniz's .monadological world 20

2.2 Leibniz, the new physics, and the divine orderliness of the universe 22

2.3 Leibniz's conception of the moral order 25

2.4 The monadological conception of the soul and its capacities 28

2.5 Leibniz and mystico-religious Neoplatonism 32

3 Kant's Development from Physical to Moral Monadologist 36

3.1 Kant's pre-critical physical monadology and the mind-body problem 37

3.2 The role of Swedenborg in the transformation of Kant's pre-critical thought 39

3.3 The role of Leibniz in the transformation of Kant's pre-critical thought 40

3.4 The role of Rousseau in the transformation of Kant's pre-critical thought 43

3.5 Kant's "semi-transcendental turn" in the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 44

4 Kant and the "Copernican" Conception of Transcendental Philosophy 52

4.1 The Copernican reversal of perspective and its consequences for metaphysics 54

4.2 The aporia of traditional metaphysics 59

4.3 Kant's modernism 61

4.4 Kant on Aristotle's "categories" and Plato's "ideas" 63

4.5 Kant's "Plato" 66

5 The Moral Framework of Metaphysics 70

5.1 The primacy of practical reason in Kant's critical philosophy 73

5.2 The object of "pure practical reason"-the moral law-can only be grounded in the form, rather than the empirical content, of the will 76

5.3 Kant's political theory 80

5.4 Concerns with Kant's practical philosophy 83

6 The Later Kant as a "Post-Kantian" Philosopher? 88

6.1 From empirical to transcendental accounts of Hutchesonian moral sense 88

6.2 The ethical infrastructure of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment 90

6.3 The symbolic dimension of beauty 95

6.4 The teleology of the world considered as a whole 97

7 Jena Post-Kantianism: Reinhold and Fichte 103

7.1 Reinhold's "proposition of consciousness" and Schulze's critique 103

7.2 Fichte's reconceptualizing of the mind as self-positing process 106

7.3 Fichte's project of the Wissenschaftslehre 108

7.4 Intersubjective recognition as a condition of self-consciousness 113

8 The Jena Romanticism of Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling 116

8.1 Friedrich Schlegel: Transcendental poetry and the unpresentable absolute 118

8.2 Schlegel and the critique of foundationalism 122

8.3 Schelling and Plato's world soul 125

8.4 Schelling's philosophy of nature 127

8.5 Art and mythology 131

9 Hegel's Idealist Metaphysics of Spirit 135

9.1 The puzzle of Hegel's attitude to religion and metaphysics 136

9.2 Hegel's critique of Kant's idea of God 138

9.3 The project of a "phenomenology of spirit" 140

9.4 Self-negating shapes of consciousness 143

9.5 Self-consciousness and the recognitive theory of spirit 146

9.6 Phenomenology, logic and metaphysics 150

10 Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the Ambiguous End of the Idealist Tradition 155

10.1 Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the will 156

10.2 The task of transcending the will: Morality and art 158

10.3 Schopenhauer and Fichte's transcendental idealism 160

10.4 The early Nietzsche: Schopenhauer, Wagner and The Birth of Tragedy 162

10.5 The later Nietzsche: Life after the deaths of tragedy and God 165

Postscript: Idealism after the End of (Its) History 175

Notes 180

Bibliography 204

Index 221