German Idealism: Kant, Fichte, and Schelling

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In this lecture I give an overview of the movement of German Idealism from Immanuel Kant and Johann Fichte to Friedrich Schelling. Special attention is given to Kant's synthetic a priori; Fichte's Ego and moral philosophy; and Schelling's naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature).
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0:00 - Introduction & Background (Bacon and Descartes)
7:16 - Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
15:10 - Johann Fichte's Science of Knowledge
31:00 - Fichte's Moral Community
35:50 - Johann von Herder and Johann von Goethe
40:56 - Friedrich Schelling's Naturphilosophie
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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is a writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous publications in the English-speaking world. He is the author of Finding Arcadia (2023), The Odyssey of Love (2021), and the Politics of Plato (2020); he has also contributed to The College Lecture Today (2019) and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters (2022).

[yomamafatoshi]

I have been watching YouTube lectures on continental philosophy for several years now. This lecture felt like a keystone that now holds it all together!!! Thank you

[spikespiegel]

Thank you for providing the context behind german idealism (something that is missing in every other youtube lecture). Makes so much sense now!

[walterbenjamin]

I had to listen to the part about Schelling several times. I need a better understanding of what Schelling means by nature. Thank you for these excellent lectures.

[bergspot]

Excellent presentation for someone staring German idealism for the first time. Thanks

[clumsydad]

more excellent stuff ! i've been forever confused about kant, and i knew next to nothing about fichte and schelling. amazing that the cultural barriers still exist in the anglo west from us to getting all this knowledge integrated and understood in our existence/academies

[scottyslearningcorner]

This is great. I am for some reason super into this lately! thank you!

[harrisonb]

Listened to this on my 10 mile run this morning. Thank you!

[TheArdipithecus]

Please do an episode on aesthetics and all of these paintings that you select in your videos. I want them. Do you have a list of these works of art? I feel selfish asking but please indulge us.

[wheresmyeyebrow]

"Humans are exceptional because they *are* the exception

I love that

[angstgegner]

I would just like to say that videos like this let me forget everything bad about today's internet, and most of it is abhorrently bad.

But still, by helping me and others understand stuff like this more deeply through videos like this, it's classification as a tool of enlightenment is justified, i think. I can't imagine the immense struggle of digging into difficult texts that i would have to do without the help of you and others to explain it to me, if i would get it at all.


I am deeply grateful! Thank you!

[canisronis]

Thank you! Getting a grip on all this mental squandering with the exception of Kant has me appreciating the genius of Shopenhauer.

[JoeBuck-ucbl]

This guy is good! He’s REAL good!!!
(Like Dalton from Roadhouse)

[WiseNationalSocialism]

I read the article you did for the Imaginative Conservative on Augustine’s City of God and appreciated it like most of the the other things you’ve produced.

I’m curious if you’ve done any works on Heraclitus. I can’t recall, and enjoy browsing this channel.
Nietzsche Ive read intended to revive his philosophy. Nietzsches hostility towards the western tradition was supposedly his motive for this.

[johncalligeros]

Thank you Paul Joseph. Is there any possibility that you might situate these three thinkers within a broader context, say that of 'German Romanticism'?

[walterbenjamin]

This is starting to sound like alchemy - the coniunctio oppositorum. Was this transmitted through Boehme?

[dwarvendefender]

Could the I => not I => absolute I process be equated with the Heroes Journey as Campbell presents it ?

[jimsteele]

Kant has a point insofar as our perceptions are limited by our inherent apparatus, categories of thought, space and time etc., but actually projecting reality seems a bit much. Why not just project the noumena? I like that you question Harris and Dawkins, especially Harris, not a fan myself. Gonna listen to all your content. Thought provoking indeed.

[marcospaulo]

this topic is so f***ing complicated, I wouldn't be surprised if they're all wrong lol

[MGHOoL]

My God this is gorgeous! Hegel is my favourite philosopher, but I didn't know much about Fichte and Schelling (other than being German Idealists who influenced Hegel). I liked how Fichte appeared here to be more existentialist than Hegel is usually presented (matter of ego and the relation with the other instead of conceptual paradigms and logic), but I LOVED Schelling's connection of the dialectic of conscious realization to nature and love! This embodiment is quite Kierkegaardian to my taste!

[jimsteele]

I like Shelling. He sounds akin to the American Transcendentalists. Am I wrong?