German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas

Please visit our website (www.fubis.org) for an overview of all courses offered and for possible updates to the course programme. About this course Philosophy has constituted a central element in the emergence of modern German culture. During the late 18th century, German philosophy participated in the wider European Enlightenment culture, which, in turn, was intertwined with the development of modern empirical science. Influenced by the historical changes brought about by the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, a special constellation of German philosophy emerged at the end of the 18th century. This philosophical movement has had a profound and enduring impact on subsequent philosophical thought, extending far beyond the borders of Germany. This philosophy course addresses the historical reality of this "German moment of philosophy" in two subsequent phases: in the first part, we follow the emergence and full deployment of German philosophy from its Kantian beginnings to Hegel’s grand but fragile synthesis, trying to understand its richness as well as its fragility. In a second part, we discuss the later renewal of German philosophy in the late 19th century and its historical tragedy in the 20th century. This will include a discussion of the new beginnings of philosophy since the mid-19th century, starting with influential thinkers such as Marx and Nietzsche, and extending to Frege, Husserl, and Wittgenstein. These philosophers reacted to the scientific and political revolutions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Martin Heidegger, as an established pro-Nazi philosopher, and Max Horkheimer, as the leading philosopher of the "Frankfurt School" driven into exile, are studied as philosophers inevitably linked to the "Night of the 20th Century". Finally, post-World War II developments in philosophy (as exemplified by Jürgen Habermas) will be examined as pathways out of the self-destructive turn that the "moment of German philosophy" had taken in the first decades of the 20th century. This shift also signifies a transition into an emerging global philosophy. The course will be centred around contemporary attempts to reconsider a global philosophical perspective. The focus will be on the tension between the Enlightenment heritage of a universalising human philosophy and a national culture project as well as on the tension between classicist rationalism and romantic emotionalism in its construction as a series of philosophical projects. From the perspective of a German version of the dialectics of the Enlightenment, the German philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries will be studied in context – combining the reading of key texts with a reconstruction of their historical contexts and their interaction.