TRANSLATED WITH THE AUTHOR'S SANCTION BY A.C. ARMSTRONG, JR. Professor of Philosophy in Wesleyan University 1893...

The aim of this translation is the same as that of the original work. Each is the outcome of experience in university instruction in philosophy, and is intended to furnish a manual which shall be at once scientific and popular, one to stand midway between the exhaustive expositions of the larger histories and the meager sketches of the compendiums. A pupil of Kuno Fischer, Fortlage, J.E. Erdmann, Lotze, and Eucken among others, Professor Falckenberg began his career as Docent in the university o

%From Descartes to Kant.% 1. The Principles 2. Nature 3. Man 1. Occasionalism: Geulincx 2. Spinoza    (a) Substance, Attributes, and Modes    (b) Anthropology; Cognition and the Passions    (c) Practical Philosophy 3. Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle (a) Theory of Knowledge (b) Practical Philosophy 1. Natural Philosophy and Psychology 2. Deism 3. Moral Philosophy 4. Theory of Knowledge (a) Berkeley (b) Hume (c) The Scottish School 1. The Entrance of English Doctrines 2. Theoretical and Practical Sensa

%From Kant to the Present Time.% 1. Theory of Knowledge    (a) The Pure Intuitions (Transcendental Aesthetic)    (b) The Concepts and Principles of the Pure Understanding   (Transcendental Analytic)    (c) The Reason's Ideas of the Unconditioned (Transcendental   Dialectic) 2. Theory of Ethics 3. Theory of the Beautiful and of Ends in Nature    (a) Aesthetic Judgment    (b) Teleological Judgment 4. From Kant to Fichte 1. The Science of Knowledge    (a) The Problem    (b) The Three Principles   

The long conflict with Scholasticism, which had been carried on with ever increasing energy and ever sharper weapons, was brought by Descartes to a victorious close. The new movement, long desired, long sought, and prepared for from many directions, at length appears, ready and well-established. Descartes accomplishes everything needful with the sure simplicity of genius. He furnishes philosophy with a settled point of departure in self-consciousness, offers her a method sure to succeed in deduc

In the contemporaries Spinoza and Locke, the two schools of modern philosophy, the Continental, starting from Descartes, and the English, which followed Bacon, had reached the extreme of divergence and opposition, Spinoza was a rationalistic pantheist, Locke, an empirical individualist. With Leibnitz a twofold approximation begins. As a rationalist he sides with Spinoza against Locke, as an individualist with Locke against Spinoza. But he not only separated rationalism from pantheism, but also q

%1. The Contemporaries of Leibnitz.% The period between Kepler and Leibnitz in Germany was very poor in noteworthy philosophical phenomena. The physicist, Christoph Sturm[1] of Altdorf (died 1703), was a follower of Descartes, Joachim Jungius[2] (died 1657) a follower of Bacon, though not denying with the latter the value of the mathematical method in natural science. Hieronymus Hirnhaym, Abbot at Prague ( The Plague of the Human Race, or the Vanity of Human Learning , 1676), declared the thirst

The suit between empiricism and rationalism had continued for centuries, but still awaited final decision. Are all our ideas the result of experience, or are they (wholly or in part) an original possession of the mind? Are they received from without (by perception), or produced from within (by self-activity)? Is knowledge a product of sensation or of pure thought? All who had thus far taken part in this discussion had resembled partisans or advocates rather than disinterested judges. They had gi

Fichte is a Kantian in about the same sense that Plato was a Socratic. Instead of taking up and developing particular critical problems he makes the vivifying kernel, the soul of criticism, his own. With the self-activity of reason (as a real force and as a problem) for his fundamental idea, he outlines with magnificent boldness a new view of the world, in which the idealism concealed in Kant's philosophy under the shell of cautious limitations was roused into vigorous life, and the great Königs

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (von) Schelling was born January 27, 1775, at Leonberg (in Würtemberg), and died August 20, 1854, at the baths of Ragatz (in Switzerland). In 1790-95 he attended the seminary at Tübingen, in company with Hölderlin and Hegel, who were five years older than himself; at seventeen he published a dissertation on the Fall of Man, and a year later an essay on Religious Myths; and was called in 1798 from Leipsic—where, after several treatises[1] in explanation of the Science of

In his period of vigorous creation Schelling was the center of an animated philosophical activity. Each phase of his philosophy found a circle of enthusiastic fellow-laborers, whom we must hesitate to term disciples because of their independence and of their reaction on Schelling himself. Only G.M. Klein (1776-1820, professor in Würzburg), Stutzmann (died 1816 in Erlangen; Philosophy of the Universe , 1806; Philosophy of History , 1808), and the historians of philosophy Ast and Rixner can be cal

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born at Stuttgart on August 27, 1770. He attended the gymnasium of his native city, and, from 1788, the Tübingen seminary as a student of theology; while in 1793-1800 he resided as a private tutor in Berne and Frankfort-on-the-Main. In the latter city the plan of his future system was already maturing. A manuscript outline divides philosophy, following the ancient division, logic, physics, and ethics, into three parts, the first of which (the fundamental science

In Fries, Herbart, and Schopenhauer a threefold opposition was raised against the idealistic school represented by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The opposition of Fries is aimed at the method of the constructive philosophers, that of Herbart against their ontological positions, and that of Schopenhauer against their estimate of the value of existence. Fries and Beneke declare that a speculative knowledge of the suprasensible is impossible, and seek to base philosophy on empirical psychology; to

%1. Italy.% The Cartesian philosophy, which had been widely accepted in Italy, and had still been advocated, in the sense of Malebranche, by Sigismond Gerdil (1718-1802), was opposed as an unhistorical view of the world by Giambattista Vico,[1] the bold and profound creator of the philosophy of history (1668-1744; from 1697 professor of rhetoric in the University of Naples). Vico's leading ideas are as follows: Man makes himself the criterion of the universe, judges that which is unknown and rem

With Hegel the glorious dynasty which, with a strong hand, had guided the fate of German philosophy since the conclusion of the preceding century disappears. From his death (1831) we may date the second period of post-Kantian philosophy,[1] which is markedly and unfavorably distinguished from the first by a decline in the power of speculative creation and by a division of effort. If previous to this the philosophical public, comprising all the cultured, had been eagerly occupied with problems in