Abstract

One of the Key Questions Facing anyone interested in German Idealism concerns the puzzling transition from Kant to Hegel: how, in the course of a mere two decades, did Kant’s critical idealism, with its emphasis on the need to limit reason’s aspirations, come to be replaced by the seemingly boundless Absolute Idealism of the late 1790s and early 1800s? The traditional—though admittedly caricatured—answer follows an appealingly straightforward path from Kant to the idealist triumvirate of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The central motivation for the absolute idealists, on this reckoning, is found in the notorious problem of the thing in itself that was taken to plague Kant’s critical idealism, and each of the later ..