A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Philosophy E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1464

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Investigate the challenging and nuanced philosophy of the long nineteenth century from Kant to Bergson Philosophy in the nineteenth century was characterized by new ways of thinking, a desperate searching for new truths. As science, art, and religion were transformed by social pressures and changing worldviews, old certainties fell away, leaving many with a terrifying sense of loss and a realization that our view of things needed to be profoundly rethought. The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Philosophy covers the developments, setbacks, upsets, and evolutions in the varied philosophy of the nineteenth century, beginning with an examination of Kant's Transcendental Idealism, instrumental in the fundamental philosophical shifts that marked the beginning of this new and radical age in the history of philosophy. Guiding readers chronologically and thematically through the progression of nineteenth-century thinking, this guide emphasizes clear explanation and analysis of the core ideas of nineteenth-century philosophy in an historically transitional period. It covers the most important philosophers of the era, including Hegel, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Mill, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Bradley, and philosophers whose work manifests the transition from the nineteenth century into the modern era, such as Sidgwick, Peirce, Husserl, Frege and Bergson. The study of nineteenth-century philosophy offers us insight into the origin and creation of the modern era. In this volume, readers will have access to a thorough and clear understanding of philosophy that shaped our world.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Notes on Contributors

Preface

Chronology of Nineteenth‐Century Philosophers

Timeline of Philosophers

Introduction

I

II

III

Bibliography

1 Transcendental Idealism

Introduction

The Copernican Turn

The Critical Apparatus

Transcendental Strategies

Transcendental Realism and Illusion

Freedom and Morality

The Limits of Transcendental Idealism

Bibliography

2 Theory of Science

Kant, Reinhold and the Foundations of Knowledge

Fichte's

Wissenschaftslehre

: A Theory of Science

The Fundamental Principles of the

Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre

Schelling's Foundationalism

Naturphilosophie

and Transcendental Philosophy

The Philosophical Break

Bibliography

3 Absolute Idealism

Introduction

Hegel's Notion of Philosophy

Hegel on (Pre‐)Kantian Philosophy

Part I of Hegel's System: Logic

The

Logic's

Part I: Being

The Logic's Part II: Essence

The

Logic's

Part III: The Concept

Part II of Hegel's System: Nature

The

Philosophy of Nature's

Part I: Mechanics

The

Philosophy of Nature's

Part II: Physics

The

Philosophy of Nature's

Part III: Organic Physics

Part III of Hegel's System:

Geist

The

Philosophy of Geist

's Part I: Subjective

Geist

The

Philosophy of Geist

's Part II: Objective

Geist

The

Philosophy of Geist

's Part III: Absolute

Geist

Conclusion

Bibliography

4 The World as Will and Representation

Pessimism

The World as Representation

The World as Will

The Ideas

The Will and Pessimism

Salvation

Conclusion

References

5 Historicizing Naturalism

Mill, Naturalism and Knowledge

Mill, Comte and the History of Knowledge

Mill as a Historicist

Bibliography

6 The Single Individual is Higher than the Universal

Kierkegaard's Connections to Nineteenth‐Century Philosophers

Ethics

Epistemology

Metaphysics

The Future of Kierkegaard Scholarship

Conclusion

References

7 The Rise of Liberal Utilitarianism

Introduction

Bentham's Political Philosophy

Mill's Comments on Bentham

Mill's Debt to Bentham

Conclusion

Bibliography

8 Critique of Religion

Introduction

David Friedrich Strauss

Feuerbach

Marx

References

9 Historical Materialism

Introduction: Marx's Life and Work

Early Writings

Theory of History

Ethics

References

Further Reading

10 Philosophy and Historical Meaning

Biographical Sketches

Schleiermacher on Religion

Schleiermacher's Ethics

Dilthey's “Critique of Historical Reason”

Dilthey on Ethics and Value

Dilthey on Religion

Conclusion

Bibliography

11 Late Utilitarian Moral Theory and Its Development

I

II

III

IV

12 American Pragmatism

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

Bibliography

13 The Value of Our Values

Introduction

Biography

Work, Style and Methodology

The Birth of Tragedy

and the Death of Tragic Culture

Positivism:

Human, All Too Human

and

Daybreak

The Gay Science

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Beyond Good and Evil

On Genealogy of Morality

The Antichrist

: Anti‐Christianity?

Ecce Homo

Nietzsche's Legacy

Bibliography

Secondary Literature

14 British Idealism

Introduction

A Short Historical Note

The British Idealists and their Antecedents

What is British Idealism?

A Short Note on the Reaction Against Idealism

T.H. Green and the System of Relations

Appearance and Reality in the Work of F.H. Bradley

Bibliography

15 Neo‐Kantianism

Institutional and Philosophical Context

Core Philosophical Principles

The Two Schools of Neo‐Kantianism

The Marburg School of Neo‐Kantianism

The Southwest School of Neo‐Kantianism

Bibliograhy

16 The Origins of Phenomenology in Austro‐German Philosophy

Historical Background. Brentano and Nineteenth‐Century European Philosophy

Some General Principles of Brentano's Philosophy

The Phenomenology of Brentano and Husserl

Bibliography

Archive Materials

17 New Logic and the Seeds of Analytic Philosophy

Introduction

Boole’s Contributions to Logic

The Influence and Continuation of Boole’s Work

Frege’s Career

Frege’s Logical Symbolism and His Criticisms of Boole’s

Frege’s Logical Systems

Frege’s Philosophy of Mathematics

Frege on Objects and the Hierarchy of Concepts

Frege on Meaning and Truth

Analytic Philosophy and the Impact of the New Logic

References

18 Time, Memory and Creativity

The Time of Bergson's Philosophy and Bergson's as a Philosophy for our Time

Bergson's Philosophy

Bergson's Guiding Insight: The Time of Life

The Fullness of Life, with Body and Soul

Good Sense and the Existential Ethos of Bergson's Philosophy

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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A Companion to Nineteenth‐Century Philosophy

Edited by John Shand

A Companion to Nineteenth‐Century Philosophy

Edited by

John Shand

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Names: Shand, John, 1956– editor.Title: A companion to nineteenth‐century philosophy / edited by John Shand.Description: First Edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2019. | Series: Blackwell companions to philosophy ; 64 | Includes index. |Identifiers: LCCN 2019003185 (print) | LCCN 2019007229 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119210030 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119210047 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119210023 (hardcover)Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, Modern–19th century.Classification: LCC B803 (ebook) | LCC B803 .C665 2019 (print) | DDC 190.9/034–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003185

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Notes on Contributors

Karl Aho (PhD Baylor University) serves as Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Social Sciences at Tarleton State University. He is also part of Tarleton's Honors College faculty as well as its Center for Environmental Studies. In addition to Søren Kierkegaard, his recent publications engage Augustine of Hippo and William James.

John J. Callanan is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at King's College London. He studied at University College Dublin and Trinity College, Oxford. His writings include Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Reader's Guide (2013, Edinburgh University Press) and several articles on Kant's theoretical philosophy. He has written on transcendental arguments, Kant's theory of analogy, the difference between mathematics and metaphysics in Kant's pre‐Critical and Critical periods, and his theory of geometrical construction. He is currently working on a book on Kant's theory of concepts and another on the philosophy of Bernard Mandeville.

Evan Clarke is an academic administrator at Northeastern University in Toronto, Canada. He earned a PhD in Philosophy from Boston College in 2014 with a dissertation entitled “Kant, Husserl, and Analyticity.” He published an article on the same subject in Husserl und die klassische deutsche Philosophie (Springer 2014, ed. Sebastian Luft and Faustino Fabbianelli). With Andrea Staiti, he co‐edited Sources of the Ideas (DeGruyter 2017), a volume on the background and early responses to Husserl’s Ideas I. His main research interest at the present is Neo‐Kantian epistemology. He is working on a project dealing the Neo‐Kantian response to Darwin. Evan taught philosophy from 2014 to 2017 at the Woods College of Advancing Studies, Boston College's school of continuing education.

James Connelly is Professor of Political Thought at the University of Hull. He is Editor‐in‐Chief of the International Journal of Social Economics, Deputy Director, Institute of Applied Ethics, Director, Centre for Idealism and the New Liberalism. His academic interests include British Idealism, the philosophy of R.G. Collingwood, and environmental politics, in particular environmental citizenship. His books include Metaphysics, Method and Politics: The Political Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood, Imprint Academic, 2003; R.G. Collingwood: a Research Companion (with P. Johnson and S. Leach), R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method (2nd ed., with G. D'Oro), Oxford University Press, 2005; The Legacy of Leo Strauss (ed. with A. Burns), Imprint Academic, 2010; Anglo‐American Idealism: Thinkers and Ideas (ed. with S. Panagakou) Peter Lang, 2010; Philosophy, History and Civilization: Essays on R.G. Collingwood (with T. Modood and D. Boucher), University of Wales Press, 1995. He is currently writing an intellectual biography of R.G. Collingwood.

Benjamin D. Crowe (PhD, Tulane) is Lecturer in Philosophy at Boston University. He is recently the editor of “The Nineteenth Century Philosophy Reader” (Routledge, 2016) and translator of J.G. Fichte, “Lectures on the Theory of Ethics (1812)” (SUNY Press, 2016). In addition, he has authored monographs, book chapters, and articles on nineteenth and twentieth century German philosophy, with particular focus on philosophy of religion.

Giuseppina D'Oro is Reader in Philosophy at Keele University. She is the author of Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience; the editor (with James Connelly) of Collingwood's An Essay on Philosophical Method; (with Constantine Sandis) of Reasons and Causes: Causalism and Anti‐Causalism in the Philosophy of Action and (with Søren Overgaard) of The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology. She is the author of numerous papers on Collingwood's philosophy of history, action and metaphilosophy and principal investigator (with Paul Giladi and Alexis Papazoglou) on a Templeton funded project “Idealism and the Philosophy of Mind.”

C. Stephen Evans is University Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Baylor University Director, Baylor Center for Christian Philosophy, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Institute for Studies of Religion, Baylor University, Professorial Fellow, Institute for Religion and Critical Enquiry, Australian Catholic University, Professorial Fellow, Logos Institute for Analytic and Exegetical Theology, University of St. Andrews. His latest book is God and Moral Obligation (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Guillaume Fréchette studied in Canada and Germany and obtained his PhD from the University of Hamburg. He is the current co‐editor of the Brentano Studien, the Primary Sources in Phenomenology series at Springer and FWF Project Director at the University of Salzburg. He has edited or co‐edited many collections (among others, Themes from Brentano [2013], Brentano's concept of intentionality [2015], Subjectivity and Intentionality [2016], La nature des intuitions [2017], Brentano 1838–1917 [2017] and Mind and Language, on the Philosophy of Anton Marty [2017]) and has published several articles on Brentano and his school, on Bolzano, Husserl, on early phenomenology and on various issues in Austro‐German philosophy. He has also edited several manuscripts by Brentano and published many translations of Brentano and his school (Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, Marty, Ehrenfels, Twardowski).

Todd Gooch is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky, USA, where he also teaches in the Honors Program. He is the author of a monograph, entitled The Numinous and Modernity (de Gruyter, 2000), as well as several book chapters on Rudolf Otto, and an extensive entry on Ludwig Feuerbach in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013; expanded in 2016). Figures discussed in his chapter on “Atheism” in the Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (2015) include Hegel, D.F. Strauss, Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Marx, Max Stirner, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He has published journal articles and delivered conference papers on the philosophies of religion of the Young Hegelians, J.S. Mill, Max Scheler, Paul Natorp and Hermann Cohen. The provisional title of his current book project is Ludwig Feuerbach and the History of Philosophy and “Humanity.”

Gabriel Gottlieb is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the editor of Fichte's “Foundation of Natural Rights”: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and the author of “Fichte's Deduction of the External World,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 2015; “Fichte's Developmental View of Self‐Consciousness” in Fichte's “Foundation of Natural Rights” A Critical Guide; and “A Family Quarrel: Fichte's Deduction of Right and Recognition,” in Kant and his German Contemporaries, Vol. II (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). He has also published essays on philosophy of action and expertise, including “Unreflective Action and the Argument from Speed,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (2011) and “Know how, Procedural Knowledge, and Choking under Pressure,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2015).

Andrew Huddleston is Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. He studied at Brown University, Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Princeton University, where he completed his PhD in 2012 under the supervision of Alexander Nehamas. Prior to coming to Birkbeck, he taught at Exeter College, Oxford. His book Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

Jan Kandiyali is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Science at Istanbul Technical University. His teaching and research focusses on political philosophy, the history of political philosophy and ethics. He is the author of articles on Marx in the European Journal of Philosophy and the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, and he is the editor of the book Reassessing Marx’s Social and Political Philosophy: Freedom, Recognition and Human Flourishing (Routledge, forthcoming 2018).

Michael R. Kelly is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego. He is the author of Phenomenology and the Problem of Time (Palgrave, 2016), editor of Bergson and Phenomenology (Palgrave, 2010), and coeditor of Early Phenomenology with Brian Harding (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought, with Jeffery Hanson (Continuum, 2012). His articles in phenomenology range across topics from self‐awareness and time‐consciousness, to envy and its sibling emotions, to bullshit and integrity.

Kevin C. Klement is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Frege and the Logic of Sense and Reference and dozens of articles on the history of analytic philosophy. He is the editor‐in‐chief of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy. Currently, he is engaged in an extended research project on the development of Bertrand Russell's philosophy, and is editing The Oxford Handbook of Bertrand Russell.

Christopher Macleod is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Lancaster, UK. His research focuses primarily on the work of John Stuart Mill. He is the co‐editor of A Companion to Mill, published by Wiley‐Blackwell in 2016 and the author of the entry on John Stuart Mill in the Stanford Encyclopedia. His work has appeared in Analysis, Utilitas, and the Philosophical Quarterly, and he is currently working on a book on Mill’s theoretical philosophy.

Douglas McDermid (PhD Brown University) is associate professor of philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. In addition to publishing articles and essays on various aspects of the history of philosophy, he is the author of two books: The Varieties of Pragmatism: Truth, Realism, and Knowledge From James to Rorty (Bloomsbury, 2006) and The Rise and Fall of Scottish Common Sense Realism (Oxford University Press, 2018).

John Shand is an Honorary Associate in Philosophy at the Open University. He studied philosophy at the University of Manchester and King's College, University of Cambridge. He has taught at Cambridge, Manchester and the Open University. The author of numerous articles, reviews, and edited books, his books include, Arguing Well (Routledge, 2000) and Philosophy and Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2002).

Anthony Skelton is associate professor of philosophy and Associate Director of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. He researches in the areas of normative ethics, the history of ethics and applied ethics. His publications have appeared in the journals Ethics, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Utilitas, Journal of Practical Ethics, and the Journal of Global Ethics. He is the co‐editor of the textbook Bioethics in Canada (Oxford University Press), the second edition of which will be published in 2019. He is currently researching and writing a book provisionally entitled Henry Sidgwick and the Conflicts of Ethics. He is an award‐winning teacher and supervisor. In 2015, he was the recipient of the Arts and Humanities Teaching Excellence Award.

Sebastian Stein is a lecturer and research associate at Tübingen University. He has published articles on post‐Kantian idealism in the Hegel Bulletin, the Archiv für Rechts‐ und Sozialphilosophie, the Hegel Jahrbücher, Revista Eletrônica Estudos Hegelianos and with the publishers Fink, Routledge and Kimé. Together with Thom Brooks, he edited and contributed to the collection Hegel’s Political Philosophy: On the Normative Significance of Method and System (Oxford, 2017). His chapter “The metaphysics of practical normativity: Kantian and Aristotelian themes in Hegel’s absolute idealism” will feature in Michael Thompson's (ed.) collection Hegel's Metaphysics and Political Philosophy (Routledge, forthcoming). Together with Dr. Gledhill, Dr. Stein is currently editing the collection Beyond Kantian Constructivism: Post‐Kantian Idealism and Contemporary Practical Philosophy for Routledge and with Dr. Joshua Wretzel, he is editing Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences: A Critical Guide (Cambridge, forthcoming).

Mary S. Troxell is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Philosophy at Boston College, where she teaches courses in ethics, aesthetics and German philosophy. She received her PhD from Boston University, and she has published articles on Schopenhauer's metaphysics, Schopenhauer's aesthetics and Kant's aesthetics.

Piers Norris Turner is Associate Professor of Philosophy and (by courtesy) Political Science at Ohio State University. His articles on John Stuart Mill's moral and political philosophy have appeared in a number of leading journals, including Ethics and the Journal of the History of Philosophy. With Gerald Gaus, he edited Public Reason in Political Philosophy: Classic Sources and Contemporary Commentaries (Routledge, 2018).

Preface

This book is pitched at someone who has a reasonably understanding of philosophy, but has yet to explore in depth the philosophy of the nineteenth century. Its aim is to help the reader over the hump of incomprehension that one may encounter when first looking at major nineteenth‐century philosophers in detail, and so equip the reader to find less forbidding reading them first‐hand.

The book is a history of philosophy, not a history of ideas. Although there may be overlap in content that might follow from the two approaches, it is accidental. A history of ideas is causal and is concerned with identifying and mapping out the effect or influence of the most important ideas in a period regardless of their justificatory support and regardless of the value of the ideas. A history of philosophy is normative, and is concerned with weighing the justificatory support of those ideas and looking at the ideas that are of greatest philosophical value, setting aside one way or another the effect or influence of those ideas. To show that the distinction is genuine one only has to consider, in the extreme, that there may be a poorly‐supported and poor idea that has a huge causal influence on an historical period, while there may be a well‐supported and brilliant idea that has no influence on an historical period. Normative philosophical relations are such as when one position purports to undermine or support another, and they may not only in fact be devoid of causal connections, but sometimes must be, as when an undermining or supporting position predates a later position. In this sense the normative relations of different philosophical positions stand outside time. A history of philosophy is really just philosophy focused on a particular period, not history at all. To be included in this book it is not necessary that an idea is important in its historical influence, and to be important in its historical influence is not sufficient for an idea to be included in this book. In short, the purpose is to explicate, analyze and critically examine the nineteenth‐century ideas of greatest philosophical value.

Having said that, it is clear that great philosophical ideas often de facto do have a close relationship to an historical period, both forming it and reflecting it. This is because philosophy might be said to sit at an intellectual pinnacle as a kind of reduced essence of the self‐understanding of any particular time. It reflects and forms the horizon of an historical period's self‐understanding, while being the keenest discipline to blur and push beyond the seemingly unbreachable boundary stones the horizon marks. It is therefore interesting and valuable to look at some of this process of forming and reflecting in itself, bearing in mind that it is a different matter and not one primarily for philosophy. An overview in respect of this, what can only be described as the ferment of nineteenth‐century ideas, is presented in the Introduction.

Another guide for the contents of the book is a weighting of those philosophers who might still engage the specifically philosophical interest of philosophers today. This will of course be a shifting matter, but not so shifting that some philosophers in the nineteenth century are not clearly enduring in their philosophical interest and value, while others, whatever the interest taken in them at the time philosophically, have slipped off the radar of current philosophers. Some have stood the test of time better than others, and generally speaking rightly so. Of course, there will be thinkers who are more or less marginal in this respect. But one cannot do everything, and to attempt to do so would only present a blizzard of names and ideas, abdicating the responsibility of guiding the reader through the most important philosophy of the nineteenth century. There may be those who think that someone should be in the book who is not; but I doubt there is anyone in the book that anyone thinks should not be.

The nineteenth century is treated in the manner of a “long century.” That is in its case one that runs from 1789 to 1914. This is because it makes more philosophical sense of what occurred to do so. Kant, for example, without whom nineteenth‐century philosophy would both appear as if from nowhere and be incomprehensible, barely scraped into the nineteenth century, dying, as he did, in 1804. Similar considerations apply to Bentham. At the other end, so many nineteenth‐century concerns sloped over into the early years of the twentieth century, that it would be an act of intellectual vandalism to bring the portcullis of what one might consider crashing down on the dot of midnight on the last day of 1899. To limit this leniency getting out of control, to appear in the book a philosopher has to have published major work before 1900. This is stuck to with the sole exception of G.E. Moore, but then only just, whose presence is required to give greater sense by way of contrast to the views of Henry Sidgwick.

Biographical material on individual philosophers is kept to a minimum. It is useful to make a motivating connection to a philosopher and give him a flesh and blood presence, and so there is usually a little biography, especially where it is interesting, and where it enables a deeper understanding of the philosophy. More such details, however, are easily found these days. The words not taken up on the biography are used to examine philosophical ideas. The chapters are also longer than usual for a book of this kind, enabling the treatment of the philosophers to be more detailed and substantial.

All the chapters are headed by a title and then the name or names of a philosopher or philosophers, except one. The exception is Chapter 15 which has a title then refers to the Marburg and Southwest Schools. This is because the philosophers involved tend initially to get treated as a small collective group. The individual philosophers involved are clearly named at the beginning of the chapter.

I should like to thank David E. Cooper, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Durham University, for his invaluable advice throughout the creation of the book. I should like also to thank Jay Kennedy for his comments on reading an earlier draft of the Introduction. And finally, appreciation extends to my wife Judi for checking my work over in her usual careful and acute way. Any faults remaining are mine.

John Shand2018

Chronology of Nineteenth‐Century Philosophers

Kant

1724–1804

Bentham

1748–1832

Fichte

1762–1814

Schleiermacher

1768–1834

Hegel

1770–1831

Schelling

1775–1854

Schopenhauer

1788–1860

Comte

1798–1857

Mill

1806–1873

Feuerbach

1804–1872

Strauss

1808–1874

Kierkegaard

1813–1855

Boole

1815–1864

Marx

1818–1883

Taine

1828–1893

Dilthey

1833–1911

Green

1836–1882

Sidgwick

1838–1900

Brentano

1838–1917

Peirce

1839–1914

James

1842–1910

Nietzsche

1844–1900

Bradley

1846–1924

Windelband

1848–1915

Cohen

1848–1918

Frege

1848–1925

Paul Natorp

1854–1924

Husserl

1859–1938

Bergson

1859–1941

Dewey

1859–1952

Rickert

1863–1936

McTaggart

1866–1925

G. E. Moore

1873–1958

Cassirer

1874–1945

Lask

1875–1915

Timeline of Philosophers

Introduction

JOHN SHAND

I

The nineteenth century was the second great intellectual revolution of humankind.1 The first emerged from the crucible of ideas in Ancient Greece 2000 years earlier. If that first occasion was humankind's coming of age, then the second marked the arrival of the responsibilities of full adulthood. It might be thought surprising that the Enlightenment is not picked out as the second great intellectual revolution. It was certainly a profound intellectual revolution, but it was to a large extent theoretical in its impact, and it was only in the nineteenth century that those theories, and the others that came afterwards, not only carried their undoubted radical theoretical power into effect, but came to penetrate every aspect of culture and the very way that people in general thought and lived, in a way that made what was theoretical unavoidable. In the first intellectual revolution it was no longer thought intellectually respectable to look to mere authority or longevic tradition for what one ought to believe true. Rather, one should look systematically at the quality of the arguments for and against what may be held to be so, driving those arguments as deep as one may. This was the start of philosophy proper. You had to think things through for yourself and make the ideas your own by checking their justification for yourself.2 One should not just take ideas down off the shelf ready‐made and taken as given, whatever their source, one must rather form one's own ideas about things bespoke with nothing beyond question. One should follow an argument where it leads, and if an argument leads to less than a firm conclusion, then that is the conclusion one should come to, and not force a conclusion to a certainty beyond what the argument supports. If one fails to find arguments supporting a definite view, then one should be open‐minded as to what actually might be the case, perhaps even skeptical. Alternatively, one may come to a justified determinate but not thereby unrevisable conclusion on the balance of the arguments if that is what the arguments justify. It is a useful lesson that the oft met craving for attained certainty, although it may seem its motivating companion, is the enemy of truth.

The nineteenth century was characterized by carrying all that this involved through to culmination. There was a ferment and excitement of ideas that had not really been seen before with such intensity or to such effect. During that century philosophers' questions penetrated intellectual presuppositions so comprehensively that there appeared at times to be nowhere left to stand, nowhere left perhaps even to carry out the questioning itself. The very enterprise of philosophy by virtue of its comprehensive thoroughgoing rigor could itself seem groundless. This threatened the whole rational enterprise – that of coming to a view on what exists, how things are, how one should live, that may result from rational deliberation. The response was sometimes an attempt at shoring things up, sometimes a nihilistic abandonment. In either case, something fundamentally new was needed, indeed seemed inevitable, and that could only be a radically rethought comprehensive Weltanschauung.

Of course such deep questioning had gone on before the nineteenth century, as already indicated, in Ancient Greece and in intervening times. What precipitated the extreme nature of the intellectual catastrophe and chaos of the nineteenth century was the clash of two worldviews shaping people's beliefs in a fundamental and acute manner not before seen and moving in opposite directions: the rise of science3 and the decline of religion. The former gathers strength, pervasiveness and advances, while the latter fights an ever‐weakening rear‐guard action having its beliefs repeatedly knocked off their pedestals by new alternative ideas, ones that undermine core claims: the age of the earth, the origins of life and man, the possibility of surviving death, the need for and the existence of God. These related religious claims, as instantiated in organized religions, were not merely coolly accepted, but were rather passionate claims that formed and were interlaced in people's lives, going to the heart of how they thought about their place in the world. All this was being cut away, and the foundations on which it stood slighted and subverted. The vigorous onward‐rolling claims of science not only widened in their scope and depth of explanation theoretically, where, as esoteric matters, they might lie hidden, rather the power of its truths were unmissably reified in practical and industrial application there for all to see, and with a pervasive sweep that had only been hinted at before. Previously it might have been possible to see science as merely a remote theoretical, circumscribed, containable intellectual ghetto, existing moderately comfortably alongside the account of the world derived from the domain of religion. In the nineteenth century this was no longer possible. Theoretically science, with an intensity not seen before, was asking the same questions as religion and coming up with very different answers, answers undergirded by meticulously acquired empirical evidence and powerful interlocking theories. Once science and its products unmistakably entered people's lives and it became increasingly obvious that its explanation of phenomena derived from a fundamentally new and rich view of underlying reality – one only has to think here of Darwin's theory of evolution and Maxwell's wave equations – any explanation of the same phenomenon by religion inevitably seemed thin and incredible and subject to the most corrosive force religion has to deal with: doubt. It was not just the opposition of scientific theories and the deliverances of religion that brought religion into disrepute for many – its literal factual claims about, for example, the age of the earth and the origins of life had made it look ridiculous enough – but rather that looking in a religious as opposed to a scientific way for those kinds of truths was increasingly thought of as rationally disreputable. It did not stop there. If religion could be wrong, and so wrong about so many things concerning the nature of the world, then even more worryingly for some, so might it be fundamentally mistaken about other things, such as ethical matters, both in respect of moral proscriptions and prescriptions and in what might normatively ground such ethical conclusions. In fact, however the weight of theoretical argument was balanced, the grip of religion was still hard to shake off both socially and because it opened up a life adrift that was difficult for many to contemplate, let alone embrace, even for those who found their views in conflict with its claims. Even while many scientists still thought they were doing God's work in displaying the wonders of His creation, along with the bright cleric with time on his hands, one of whom found shattering geological evidence along the coastline indicating the true age of the earth, they were, perhaps often unwittingly, casting doubt on what religion and its institutions had for centuries inculcated and indoctrinated, dinning into people putative essential unassailable truths and moreover religion as the only true source of such truths.

The artists knew better. They sensed and understood the forces that had been unleashed that ate away at what supported whatever consolations religion had to offer for a life that seemed full of uncertainty, loss, pain, and death. To get the full effect of that one only has to read the internal battle mapped out in Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem “In Memoriam” of 1849, or the cosmic comfortless desolation, leaving behind only the residue of what individuals might desperately give each other, encapsulated in Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach” of 1867. In music one can hear it, if properly attuned, in the ebb and flow of affirmation and doubt in the symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler, especially the 9th Symphonies4 of both composers, where both try to affirm life in the face of everything that would undermine affirmation. These thoughts are also in the vast alternative mythological realm reflecting the all‐too‐human world in Wagner's Ring Cycle and in his other operas where notably the safety of musical tradition, of tonality and standard musical forms, are left behind and pushed beyond their limits. Bruckner illustrates the stress of a huge range of unconsonant belief and the inner turmoil that accompanies it. While still piously on his knees,5 his admiration for Wagner was boundless, and in his unfinished 9th Symphony, Bruckner produced a work of at times shattering anguish, including a forte tutti climax in its final movement that is the greatest dissonance in nineteenth‐century music. Edvard Munch's The Scream was completed in 1893 and bespeaks of existential Angst, and a terribly aloneness among nature, and nothing of religious certitude, but rather of terrible inner conflict.

For many the changes were not some distant battle that could be ignored as an arid intellectual debate, but a personal catastrophe. Even for those almost unaware of what was going on concerning such matters, those isolated and insulated by community and social structures, for whom such debates were a distant rumble, it was hard not to sense the ground moving under one's feet.

From the time of the Ancient Greeks the danger had always been there: that from arguments, when truly open‐minded and with nothing going without saying, there would emerge awkward questions for religion, in particular for religions which exalted faith, a credo, and a doxology. However, because of the cultural hegemony of Christianity, allowing it to pick and choose Ancient Greek teaching, and although it may have been weakened later in its unity by the arguably self‐destructive rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth‐century, religion was able to accommodate itself to speculative metaphysical, scientific, and moral, claims of Ancient Greek philosophy. Applying a method of intellectual assimilation by interpretation directed particularly to, as it emerged the most prominent figure of Ancient Greek philosophy, Aristotle (Plato's writing by historical accident appeared later in Europe and created more of an accommodation problem for Christianity), religion effectively neutering any threat that might be derived from Ancient Greek metaphysics. One might see it as a strategy of keeping one's potential argumentative enemies close. The dismissal of such obviously outstanding thinkers would have been both impractical and palpably unconvincing; the best way was to show how they were unknowing if outstanding precursors to Christian doctrine. In the metaphysical and theological work of Thomas Aquinas, arguably the most influential of the Christian medieval philosopher‐theologians, we find effectively Aristotelianism perfectly adapted to Christian religion. Aquinas was too intelligent not to see how intelligent Aristotle was, and Aquinas was too good a philosopher, albeit overlaid with the dictates of theology, not to see how good a philosopher Aristotle was or to think that Aristotle could have been overwhelmingly wrong – so it was a matter of showing how it could be right given what religion knew to be true. As the claims of religion were true, the claims of the Ancient Greeks must be seen as either false, or precursors of truths that religion already knew to be true. Aristotle was a Christian without even knowing it. Of course if the claims of religion were true, then if others sought the truth, it was unsurprising that they should come to the same conclusion if only by a different root. Some truth may only be accessible by divine revelation from the top down; but this left a huge overlap of truths that could be accessed through non‐revelatory reasoning and experience from the bottom up. But the grotesque question‐begging nature of the whole enterprise – assuming one knew what was true, and separating the true and the false on the basis of it – itself lay unquestioned. This was all being turned on its head in the nineteenth century.

This may seem to be belied by continued church building during the nineteenth century and recruitment of clergy in certain parts of Europe. However, this apparent confidence is countered by the increasing schisms within Christianity, particularly owing to non‐conformists, a fracturing that points to increased weakness not a singular hegemony, the strength of unity. Moreover, buildings and clergy do not an argument make. Significant as an indicator of the philosophical climate in the nineteenth century, it was the first time that a substantial number of public figures openly declared that they had no religious beliefs. Perhaps most significant was that, by the last part of the nineteenth‐century, greater secularization brought about the previously conjoined separation of education and religion, particularly at universities, leading to the dropping of clerical requirements on those who might teach and an expansion of subjects to the new sciences. The intellectual milieu had changed.

The theoretical foundations for this lay in the work of thinkers during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The catastrophe that befell religion and much of what was derived from it, not only in respect of explaining the world, but in its normative ethical pronouncements and its social control, was underway in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, culminating in the Enlightenment. Indeed, Immanuel Kant said, “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self‐incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without guidance of another,” (Kant 1996a [1784],p. 418) However, only with the nineteenth century did it reach the point where it might be said that a clear and widespread intellectual, moral, and artistic, revolution was occurring that took an unignorable, irreversible, and no longer controllable stand and fully formed into a movement against religion. From then on, at least in Europe, except in isolated communities, religion had its back against the wall. It engaged in futile acts of entrenched defense such as that of Anglo‐Catholicism and non‐conformist Bible literalists, or it sought a safe “spiritual” enclave where science and the prevailing rise of new philosophical ideas might be said to have nothing to say that may conflict with it, or it defused attacks upon it by a scramble to set up a respectable philological–historical scholarly “higher criticism” interpreting the biblical and other religious texts, as had in fact been applied to those of Ancient Greek texts. The latter took place and flourished particularly in Germany where the rise of Protestantism gave scholars both more scope and incentive. Looking for historical confirmation from other texts of the events in the Bible was always going to be a dangerous game for one wanting to affirm religious claims, as one never knew what historical facts were going to turn up, as opposed to their verification being grounded on the impregnable deliverances of divine revelation. So much of this involved an enormous shooting in the foot. Doubt was ushered into the room even as the intention might be to close the door on it just because the door and the possibility of it being opened have been raised at all. Again, the specter of hubristic, not to say optimistic, question‐begging: the credo of religion was true, so one surely had nothing to fear from looking to the philological and historical facts.

Of course in a sense the key point here, in what might seem an account overshadowed by religion, is not that the full maturity of free thought emerged as never before in the nineteenth century in opposition to the constraints of religion, but that free thought emerged in opposition to whatever might have countered such free thought. For good historical reasons, and perhaps intellectual reasons too, the surge toward the new ways of free thinking, which was to underpin what we now regard as the modern world, found themselves countering and conflicting with religion, as one would expect when it had formed the fundamental outlook of humankind in general, and in Europe in particular, up to that point. Nothing sums this up better than that by the end of the nineteenth century6 Nietzsche was able to declare with confidence “God is Dead,” noting that we had killed him, that it was the greatest thing that was ever done, and that the void of God's function had to be filled by something else, something more radically new than had ever gone before: the transvaluation of all values. In other words, life based on a new way of grounding values, a totally different way from what had gone before, a way that could only come from us and not anything beyond us. We were alone, and that changed everything.

Of course, many people had always thought they thought for themselves, but they often fail to do so because they were not willing really to think with no holds barred, nor take the uncomfortable, indeed often painful, steps involved in throwing off ingrained habits of thought, things in their outlook which were, at best tacitly beyond question and at worst things of which they were unaware as forming their thinking. By the end of the nineteenth century there was looking to be no choice if one was intellectually honest, not to say not cowardly, but to think for yourself in a deep way, from the bottom up, about what you were going to consider true and how as a consequence you were going to live your life. What had once been a distant intellectual possibility, perhaps even unthinkable, had now become a pressing intellectual duty. At least this dutiful encumbrance was supposed to be so for the intellectually and emotionally honest. As the walls of assumptions enclosing the restricted citadel of received ideas collapsed to dust, a person was left exposed on a daunting featureless desert plain that one had to fill with one's own ideas with no help from anywhere. Moreover, such thinking‐for‐yourself, working‐things‐out‐for‐yourself, bereft of external self‐identifying validation, became a matter for the individual in all of his or her personal individual peculiarity, laying the road to the fully modern way of thinking about things and conducting one's life. One was no longer required to squeeze oneself into an ill‐fitting mold pre‐shaped by others, rather one formed a shape in life that by one's own lights fitted you in particular as far as one was able and aspired to it. Anything else could lead to nothing but damage and deformity of character. Freedom, but what a weight one now carried.

However, an important aspect of nineteenth‐century thought, manifest in the romantic creations in art, and becoming more acutely articulated in philosophy toward the end of the century and in the early twentieth century, was a reaction to the over‐zealous and inappropriate application of science, that is to say an opposition to scientism. This was natural enough considering the apparently all‐conquering extension of science into every nook of human life. Some of this stemmed from a reaction against having everything explained and, some might say, explained away. Sometimes this meant specifically a criticism that natural science was attempting to understand matters for which its methods and approach were inappropriate, thereby doing harm to other ways of understanding. Certainly, some philosophers, such as Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy (his hermeneutics), and perhaps most clearly Bergson, cautioned against science being a complete explanation of the world as it essentially involved an abstraction from the particularity of the world and our lived experienced world an experience which some claimed gave a more accurate view of reality, something that science's indifferent universalism was necessarily unable to capture.

The philosophers of the nineteenth century sit atop of gigantic intellectual ferment and revolution. They express the full range of responses to the impelling intellectual challenges. Indeed, they are often both responders to and sources of such challenges. In them we see the nineteenth century exposed down to its deepest roots, flayed and laid bare, and that very act, whatever the particular results of individual philosophers, collectively, is the act that gave birth to the modern world.7

II

The philosophical relationships of the philosophers of the nineteenth century are complex and subtle. Yet some legitimate attempt may be made to give an overview and map connections. This is mainly because so much of nineteenth‐century philosophy was dominated by idealism and reactions to it. Not entirely – but enough. Idealism is characterized by arguing for the dependence of the world on mind or consciousness. This varies not only in degree, but also as to how mind is conceived along the entire spectrum from the individual mind to a universal mind. The intuitive starting point for this is simple enough once one realizes that it is impossible to get at any sense of what and how the world is independently of our conscious awareness of it. We cannot look around the corner of our awareness of the world to the world and see the world devoid of any of the ways we may be aware of it. We cannot hold up our conscious understanding of the world and the world devoid of any conscious understanding of it and compare the two, perhaps seeing how accurate the conscious awareness is compared to how the world is in itself. Any attempt to do so simply adds a further third layer of conscious understand, and so on ad infinutum