/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15557224]

As someone who has only read a bit of the greeks.What would i need to read before starting with german idealism?

[Anonymous No.15557249]

Plato's Republic
Aristotle Metaphyicis and Soul
Descartes meditations metaphysiques
Spinoza Ethics and PTT
Rousseau Social Contract
Kant 2 first Critiques
You can read guides, summaries and book chapters on those to save time.

[Anonymous No.15557294]

>>15557249
>First 2 critiques
but the third is most important for German idealism lol

>>15557224
mainly you just need to read Kant's 3 critiques, then you will understand the mindset for idealism and speculative philosophy

[Anonymous No.15557306]

Beiser's German Idealism is a good introduction. Prolegomena is a good Kant cheat. Launch in after that.

[Anonymous No.15557362]

>>15557294
Why do you think so?

[Anonymous No.15557384]

seconding beiser
roots of romanticism, berlin
first chapter of charles taylor's hegel

[Anonymous No.15557467]

>>15557362
It's where Kant fleshes out intellectual intuition, the basis of Fichte's "revolution", and where Schelling is inspired for his Spinozist leaning which results in his identity philosophy. The idea running through the third Critique is the underlying unity and connection between subject and nature- this is the same subject matter as german idealism as a whole.

Of course, this unity as "Reason" with a capital R rests on the 2nd critique, and the idealist viewpoint in itself rests on the 1st critique, they are all absolute required reading for Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel

[Anonymous No.15557476]

>>15557384
I really enjoyed Beiser's Hegel too. Come into begrudgingly and walked away with an admiration.

[Anonymous No.15557854]

>>15557294
>>15557306
Thanks a lot! So a good ideia would be to start with Beiser's German Idealism as an introduction and then proceed trough this chart?

[Anonymous No.15558489]

>>15557224
Actually very little. Beiser has written several books about the time period that can really help you understand that period in German philosophical history.
>>15557306 is the main work, dealing directly with post-Kantian Idealism up to & including early Schelling.
"Fate of Reason" deals with the period right before that, mainly focusing on philosophical debates going on before Kant wrote his first critique (and inspired Kant), and the reception of Kant's work. I especially like the chapter on Hamann, the one on Herder, and his coverage of the whole pantheism controversy.
I also really like both Beiser's book on the early Jena Romantics ("The Romantic Imperative"), and his book on Schiller's philosophy.
Beiser also wrote a book on Hegel, if you are interested going in that direction, as well as several other books not directly related to Idealism at all (I read one on Aesthetic Rationalism and one on post-Schopenhauer Pessimism).

A Books from another author you might like is Pinkard's "German Philosophy 1760-1860" (similar to Beiser's work but less detailed over a longer time period in one book).

[Anonymous No.15558575]

>>15557294
Could someone give me the tl;dr on the Fichtean doctrine of Self and Not-Self?

[Anonymous No.15558872]

Bump

[Anonymous No.15559110]

>>15557224
just read Hegel bro

[Anonymous No.15559119]

>>15558575
Sure,

An intellectual intuition is one where the thought of the thing is the real singular thing itself. The idea is that since God's knowledge is perfect, if he thought of a chair, it would not be the concept of a chair but a chair itself. The distinction between concept and intuition breaks down and subject and object are the same. Kant said it's not possible for humans to have this, because this distinction is what gives us consciousness in the first place.

Fichte realized that we have such an intellectual intuition, and this is the self. To be self-conscious, you have to be conscious of the self - but without a consciousness of the self, there is no self. Our consciousness of the self is at the same time the creation of the self which would not exist without it. For Fichte, the "I" is nothing other than the *process* of self-determination as an I, or self-consciousness.

Since the original self would be undetermined, it would be infinite. Becoming determined means to be limited (distinct). If the self determines itself, it limits itself. The self regards its limit as the Not-I, or its passivity, and the reflection of its activity from this limit back into itself (reflection) is the appearance of the Not-I. Not-I is nature.

But, once the I has determined itself, it finds that the determined self is inadequate. The finite object in this case, the self, is not (and cannot be) adequate to the subject, which is infinite. So the self has failed to determine itself and continues to re-determine itself - to push its boundaries to repair this primordial wound. It attempts to overcome or absorb the Not-I back into itself, to become infinite again- science, culture, drive for truth, morality, etc, is all various attempts to reincorporate nature back into the subject. But since something determined can never be adequate to something indeterminate/infinite, the original subject, this task is an infinite one.

Anyway from the I = I that he starts his Wissenschaftslehre from he reconstructs Kantian categories etc in terms of levels of reflection and so on, very much so in the spirit of Reinhold's theory of representation of which Fichte was a student. The relation of his philosophy to Kant is he sees Kant as correct and the Wissenschaftslehre ends where Kant's CoPR begins.