German philosophy

The German philosophy is the philosophy of the German-speaking area. Due to the fragmented German history , German philosophy naturally only began to develop a genuinely national profile relatively late - but German philosophers have always made significant contributions to European intellectual history .

It was only in the 18th century that a typically German approach to philosophy began to develop that encompassed not only content and language, but also the habitus of the philosophers. For a long time, German philosophy remains an academic matter; the public takes no part in the debates and issues.

In their university environment, German philosophers prefer to tackle problems that arise from the scientific developments in the disciplines in the respective epoch. The philosophical schools and currents are also adapting to this trend.

The middle age

The prerequisites for the development of the humanities were created with Charlemagne in the Carolingian and Ottonian Renaissance by setting up monastery and palace schools in which the septem artes liberales, the seven liberal arts , are taught. It mainly uses ancient texts written exclusively in Latin .

The first German philosophical terminology is created by the Swiss Notker Labeo ; but this does not find its way into the written works (see 17th century). This language development is mainly accomplished in the context of German mysticism , of which Meister Eckhart is the main representative . Another representative of German mysticism is Hildegard von Bingen .

In the High Middle Ages Albertus Magnus became the most important representative of German philosophy, which was entirely under the pan-European influence of scholasticism .

At the beginning of the 15th century, Nikolaus von Kues lived , who determined the most important task of philosophy to be the dialectical thinking of the coincidence of opposites, coincidentia oppositorum . This concern stands in total contrast to the then prevailing logical understanding of contradiction thinking as falsehood. He was the first to clarify his method of thinking with mathematical considerations of the concept of infinity: In the infinitely large, the circumference of the circle and the straight line coincide and become identical. In the infinitesimally small, the spherical surface and point coincide. With his philosophy, Kues anticipated many thinkers, including Copernicus and Kepler, who strongly determined the first half of the following century.

Humanism, Reformation and the Copernican Turn - the 16th Century

System philosophy in the 17th century

Until the 17th century, legal and natural philosophy (Paracelsus) were predominant

The first universal thinker of modern times was Leibniz , who worked in Berlin from the middle of the 17th century. He was the founder of German rationalism . With his theory of monads he tried to explain the world, which on the one hand took into account the mechanistic worldview of the French thinker Descartes , but on the other hand should also be compatible with the religious ideas of the time. To this end, he designed a rationalistic-idealistic building of thought, at the center of which was the monad, living, simple units from which the whole of the world should be built. Since God represents the primordial monad, he used this function to adjust all monads to a harmoniously ordered cosmos and thus to create a so-called pre - established harmony . That is why Leibniz thought our world was the best of all possible.

First made use Christian Thomasius in his philosophical works of the German language, which had been hitherto always written in Latin. It was also Thomasius who gave the first German-language university lecture in 1687.

The German Enlightenment in the 18th century

The German Enlightenment is part of an intellectual movement or current that had an impact in large parts of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its roots can be found mainly in France and England. Important representatives of the German Enlightenment were Christian Thomasius , Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn , Lessing , Immanuel Kant , Herder and many others.

At the end of the 1680s, Thomasius announced that he would now give his lectures in German. This also meant a break with the scholastic school philosophy of orthodox theology, as well as a turn to everyday language and everyday problems. He put questions of wisdom in the center of his thinking and challenged his readers and students to think independently. This requirement was fundamentally new. Up until now, the school philosophy had to reflect on the authority opinions of spiritual masterminds. However, this was no longer enough for Thomasius, he rather demanded that the authorities themselves should be questioned. This kind of philosophical thinking, which included his own experiences and his own readings by various authors, he called eclectic. A common thread leads from eclecticism to Kant's conception of maturity.

Kant's so-called critical philosophy asks four central questions:

What can i know
What should I do?
What can I hope for?

what is the human?

Kant seeks the answers to these questions in his three most important works, the critiques. In each of the reviews, the possibilities of knowledge for a certain section of reality are examined and category systems are worked out to describe them. In 1781 the Critique of Pure Reason appears , in which he examines mathematics, the natural sciences and metaphysics for their possibilities. The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) examines ethics, politics and law, while the Critique of Judgment of 1790 deals with the production of works of art and technical devices and the knowledge that can be derived from them.

Although he himself gave the most detailed answer to his four basic questions at the time, he did not fail to answer the question with his famous essay : What is the Enlightenment of 1784 to encourage others to think about these questions as well. He himself demonstrated the courage required to think for oneself and to shake off all paternalism in a large number of individual scientific essays and articles that were oriented towards the questions of the time.

19th century - the machine age

The Kantian philosophy, which ended an entire chapter of philosophy, the dispute between empiricists and rationalists, became the starting point for new debates and systems.

The German idealists invoked the so-called idealistic elaboration of the “thing-in-itself” problem in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason , while the realists relied on the realistic variant in the second edition of the same work.

With German idealism , German philosophy gained worldwide recognition. Its main representatives were Fichte , Schelling and Hegel , with Hegel in particular having a educational effect in several directions; both Hegelianism and Marxism are based, among other things, on his thinking.

Pre-march

The second half of the 19th century was dominated by industrialization and produced corresponding philosophies: this sentence would probably have found the support of the man who coined the sentence That being determines consciousness . This sentence was one of the guiding principles of Karl Marx's philosophy . The great advances in science and technology also led in Marx's thinking to a natural law-based social theory and a deterministic view of history.

Turn to empirical knowledge
positivism

The second important trend of the 19th century was the philosophy of life with its main representatives Dilthey , Schopenhauer and Nietzsche .

20th Century - Mystery of Reality

The 20th century, with its new scientific findings, shook the spiritual security that had been regained in the last epochs since secularization. The uncertainty principle of Heisenberg , the relativity theories of Einstein and the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud , to name just three important examples had an impact on the lifestyle of the era and in art ( Abstract Art , Kandinsky ), science and philosophy. At the beginning of the 20th century, Neo-Kantianism and phenomenology were the most important new currents in philosophy.

From phenomenology, the German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers developed the existential philosophy in the course of this epoch .
Ernst Bloch developed his philosophy of hope based on Marxism .