Abstract

This chapter reconstructs Schiller’s ethics and moral philosophy, referring to his aesthetics and anthropology. After analyzing Schiller’s early philosophical writings, the chapter outlines Schiller’s ethical thought in his On Grace and Dignity (1793) and his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1795). The chapter argues that Schiller’s ethics is complex: it comprises a perfectionist, a teleological, and an expressivist dimension, and can be interpreted as a kind of virtue ethics. In doing so, the chapter focuses on Schiller’s conception of man, of will, of heautonomy, and of the aesthetic state.