Books

The Kantianism of Hegel and Nietzsche by Robert Zimmerman

Lesley Chamberlain wants to rescue Kant from an interesting book by Robert Zimmerman.

The story of German Idealism’s metamorphosis from the critical philosophy of Kant, through Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, to Nietzsche’s science of joy, is well-known to historians of ideas. The German Idealist disposition effectively founded the post-1789 tradition of thought onto which Marx, Nietzsche and Freud mapped the modern. Continental philosophers work these post-1789 seams closely; Anglo-American philosophers are less aware of the riches they contain than of the noxious gases they have sometimes given off. But it’s not simply a matter of suspicions justified or not. The fundamental difference of approach, still enshrined in a basic non-Continental philosophical education, begins with differences in understanding Kant.

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