This concise but comprehensive book provides an original history of German-language philosophy from the Middle Ages to today. In an accessible narrative that explains complex ideas in clear language, Vittorio Hosle traces the evolution of German philosophy and describes its central influence on other aspects of German culture, including literature, politics, and science. Starting with the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, the book addresses the philosophical changes brought about by Luther's reformation, and then presents a detailed account of the classical age of German philosophy, including the work of Leibniz and Kant; the rise of a new form of humanities in Lessing, Hamann, Herder, and Schiller; the early Romantics; and the Idealists Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The following chapters investigate the collapse of the German synthesis in Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche.0Turning to the twentieth-century, the book explores the rise of analytical philosophy in Frege and the Vienna and Berlin circles; the foundation of the historical sciences in Neo-Kantianism and Dilthey; Husserl's phenomenology and its radical alteration by Heidegger; the Nazi philosophers Gehlen and Schmitt; and the main West German philosophers, including Gadamer, Jonas, and those of the two Frankfurt schools. Arguing that there was a distinctive German philosophical tradition from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the book closes by examining why that tradition largely ended in the decades after World War II. A philosophical history remarkable for its scope, brevity, and lucidity, this is an invaluable book for students of philosophy and anyone interested in German intellectual and cultural history.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Translator’s Note
• Preface to the English Translation
• 1 Does German Philosophy Have a History? And Has There Ever Been a “German Spirit”?
• 2 The Birth of God in the Soul: The Beginnings of German-language Philosophizing in the Middle Ages in the Work of Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa’s Consummation and Demolition of Medieval Thought
• 3 The Change in the Philosophical Situation Brought about by the Reformation: Paracelsus’s New Natural Philosophy and the “No” in Jakob Böhme’s God
• 4 Only the Best Is Good Enough for God: Leibniz’s Synthesis of Scholasticism and the New Science
• 5 The German Ethical Revolution: Immanuel Kant
• 6 The Human Sciences as a Religious Duty: Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, the Early Romantics, and Wilhelm von Humboldt
• 7 The Longing for a System: German Idealism
• 8 The Revolt against Christian Dogmatics: Schopenhauer’s Discovery of the Indian World
• 9 The Revolt against the Bourgeois World: Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx
• 10 The Revolt against Universalistic Morals: Friedrich Nietzsche
• 11 The Exact Sciences as a Challenge and the Rise of Analytic Philosophy: Frege, the Viennese and Berlin Circles, Wittgenstein
• 12 The Search for a Foundation of the Human Sciences and the Social Sciences in Neo-Kantianism and Dilthey, and Husserl’s Exploration of Consciousness
• 13 Is Philosophy Partly to Blame for the German Catastrophe? Heidegger between Fundamental Ontology and the History of Being
• 14 National Socialist Anthropology and Political Philosophy: Arnold Gehlen and Carl Schmitt
• 15 The Federal Republic’s Adaptation to Western European Normality: Gadamer, the Two Frankfurt Schools, and Hans Jonas
• 16 Why We Cannot Assume That There Will Continue to Be a German Philosophy
• Index of Names