The early philosophy of Fichte and Schelling

Abstract

German idealistic thinking can be approached in many different ways, each of which has peculiar advantages and problems. According to the standard view, the German idealist movement is best looked at as a philosophical program that was developed in the wake of Kant's Critical philosophy with the intention of improving his transcendental idealism in various directions. The now-dominant version of this view has it that, starting with K. L. Reinhold, a whole generation of young German philosophers embarked on the project of arriving at new foundations for Kant's philosophy, of distinguishing what was taken to be the highly promising spirit of his philosophical conception from its rather poor literal expression by Kant himself, and of providing the missing premises for the conclusions of his theory. Although this project was approached from very different points of view by each of the main figures of that movement - J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel - there were some convictions that they shared.