German idealism

German idealism was a philosophical movement in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and revolutionary politics. The predominant philosophers in the movement were Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Lesser lights include Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Schleiermacher. It is generally taken to have culminated with Hegel.

Schulze

Kant felt that a mental idea or representation must be of something external to the mind. He gave the name of "thing-in-itself" to that which is represented. However, G.E. Schulze wrote, anonymously, that the law of cause and effect only applies to the phenomena within the mind, not between those phenomena and any things-in-themselves outside of the mind. That is, a thing-in-itself cannot be the cause of an idea or image of a thing in the mind. In this way, he discredited Kant's philosophy by using Kant's own reasoning to disprove the existence of a thing-in-itself.

Related Topics:
Kant - G.E. Schulze

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~