Core Theses
Kant’s thing-in-itself is incoherent and must be eliminated.
Philosophy must be a complete system derived from a single principle.
The subject (the I, Spirit) is not merely in the world but constitutive of it.
Freedom is the highest principle — of philosophy and of history.
The sequence runs: Immanuel Kant‘s critical philosophy → Fichte’s philosophy of the self-positing I → Schelling’s philosophy of nature and identity → Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel‘s absolute idealism. All in about fifty years, mostly in the small university towns of Jena, Tübingen, Berlin. Hölderlin, Schelling and Hegel were roommates at the Tübingen seminary.
Reactions defined the nineteenth century: Arthur Schopenhauer‘s pessimism, Søren Kierkegaard‘s existentialism, Karl Marx‘s materialism, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi‘s charge of “nihilism”.
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Immanuel Kant
The philosopher who tried to end the war between rationalism and empiricism by asking what the mind itself contributes to experience — the “Copernican revolution” in philosophy.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The philosopher of Spirit and dialectic, for whom reality is a rational process working itself out through contradiction in history — “the real is the rational”.
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related by shared connectionsDialectic
The movement of thought — and for Hegel, of reality — through contradiction toward a richer unity.
Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel’s first masterpiece — the “voyage of discovery” of consciousness through sense-certainty, self-consciousness, reason, spirit and religion to absolute knowing.
The Categorical Imperative
Kant’s supreme principle of morality — act only on maxims you could will as universal laws; treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means.
Simone de Beauvoir
French existentialist philosopher and novelist whose The Second Sex (1949) — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — founded modern feminist philosophy, and whose ethics of ambiguity argued that my freedom requires the freedom of others.
What Can We Know?
The relay race of epistemology — from Plato’s Cave to Kant’s categories, via Descartes’ demon and Hume’s billiard balls.
Critique of Pure Reason
Kant’s masterwork, asking what reason can know without experience — and answering that it can know the forms of all possible experience, but nothing beyond.