Post-Kantian German idealism is an important influence on such contemporary approaches to philosophy as phenomenology, existentialism, and pragmatism, and because of this Seidel has undertaken an investigation of the related notions of activity and ground as they appear and develop in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Common to all three thinkers is an emphasis on activity as conscious, free, and functioning as the ground or source of meaning for being. Each thinker in his own way also accepts the notion of a (...) dialectical interaction between the self and the world in which subject and object reciprocally influence one another. (shrink)