Most Famous German Idealism Philosophers
German Idealism is the philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in response to Kant's critical philosophy. Its leading figures, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, sought to develop systematic metaphysics in which mind or spirit constitutes the structure of reality. The movement is characterized by a turn to subjectivity, a focus on freedom and self-consciousness, and a dialectical method of reasoning. German Idealism influenced subsequent currents in Marxism, existentialism, phenomenology, and continental philosophy. Kant's transcendental idealism is generally treated as the precursor and starting point of the tradition.
Philosophers in this tradition
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, dramatist, novelist, scientist, and the towering figure of German Classicism. His novel The Sorrows of Young Werther made him famou...
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Ludwig Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach was a German anthropological philosopher and one of the most influential of the Young Hegelians. After training under Hegel at Berlin and a brief univer...
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Friedrich Schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was a 19th-century German philosopher and a leading figure of German Idealism alongside Fichte and Hegel. His early Naturphilosophie sought to...
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and the most influential systematic thinker of the German Idealist tradition. His Phenomenology of Spirit traces the devel...
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Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher of the Enlightenment born in Konigsberg, Prussia. His Critique of Pure Reason sought to reconcile rationalism and empiricism by arguing th...
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Friedrich Schiller
Friedrich Schiller was a German philosopher, poet, and playwright, the close collaborator of Goethe at Weimar and one of the most important Kantian thinkers of his generation. H...
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Friedrich Schleiermacher
Friedrich Schleiermacher was a German theologian and philosopher, often regarded as the father of modern Protestant theology and modern hermeneutics. His Speeches on Religion to...
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Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher and one of the founding figures of German Idealism. Beginning from Kant's critical philosophy, he developed the Wissenschaftslehr...
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Friedrich Schlegel
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel was a German philosopher, literary critic, and one of the central figures of early Romanticism. With his brother August Wilhelm he founded the At...
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Novalis
Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, who published under the pen name Novalis, was a German poet, mystic, and philosopher of early Romanticism. Trained in law and mi...
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Wilhelm von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt was a Prussian philosopher, linguist, and statesman, founder of the modern research university and of the modern philosop...
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Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer was a German theologian, philosopher, and historian of the early Christian church and one of the leading figures of the Young Hegelian movement in the 1830s and 1840...
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David Strauss
David Friedrich Strauss was a German Protestant theologian, philosopher, and biographer and one of the most controversial religious thinkers of the nineteenth century. After stu...
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August Cieszkowski
Count August Cieszkowski was a Polish philosopher, economist, and political reformer and one of the most original of the Young Hegelians of the 1830s and 1840s. His Prolegomena ...
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Dieter Henrich
Dieter Henrich was a German philosopher, professor at the University of Munich, and the most important interpreter of post-Kantian German Idealism of the second half of the twen...
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Salomon Maimon
Salomon Maimon was a Polish-born Jewish philosopher of the German Enlightenment, born in Lithuania to a poor Hasidic family, who escaped his early circumstances to become one of...