Birth: November 27, 1949
Liberals and leftists are not wrong in describing romanticism as reactionary, because it did indeed become that after 1810. The problem is that they ….
Schiller never wanted to replace the moral with the aesthetic but he did want the moral to be one part of the aesthetic. He rightly notes the aesthet….
The connection between romantic politics and aesthetics is plain in Schiller's and Novalis's concept of the aesthetic or poetic state..
No one nowadays talks about the absolute, not even people with firm and deep religious convictions. The whole Hegelian project has no resonance for u….
There is no comfortable middle path where we get to provide a rational justification for our basic moral, religious and common sense beliefs..
Schiller is an important philosopher because he shows just how integral the idea of beauty is in normal life..
There is a sinister anachronistic interpretation of the aesthetic state as some kind of totalitarian regime that puts aesthetic over moral standards;….
The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing mo….
All the spookiness comes from giving a contemporary anachronistic sense to terms whose historical meaning is lost to us..
Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i.e., god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite, of the universe as….
Royce is the father of the thesis that German idealism is a story about the discovery and development of the Kantian transcendental ego - the "I" tha….
The romantics were reacting against a modern culture that divided individuals from themselves (through specialisation in the division of labor), from….
The idea of romanticising the world goes back to the idea of creating a harmonious whole where the individual will feel at one with himself, others a….
To live well is to live in harmony with ourselves, others and nature, and that idea of harmony is, of course, an aesthetic one..
Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel..
There was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason..
The years 1781 to 1793 are crucial for many reasons, but chiefly because they pose in an especially clear way the main problem of German philosophy f….
That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy..
The aesthetic dimension of the ideal state comes out in the idea of harmony, which is the classical idea of beauty as "concinnitas" or "unity-in-vari….
The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all….
The absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed..