Category: Text

‘German Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction’ by Andrew Bowie is an introduction to German philosophy.
In this book, Bowie introduces philosophers and philosophical schools of German philosophy almost chronologically.

Digests of each chapters are below.
Introduction – The Anglo-American philosophers regard German philosophy as both impenetrable and excessively speculative. Beside, the analytical philosophy has concentrated their constituent by the formulation of the modern natural science. But the philosophy became inadequate to our everyday actual life. Although German philosophy work on the problem of modernity and present how we might deal with the real world.
Chapter 1 – Kant radically separated the cognitive knowledge and the ethical knowledge. Modern nihilism is the consequence of the idea that there is no value in nature.
Chapter 2 – Before the ‘linguistic turn’, the origin of language considered to be divine. It is a part of God’s creation to the intelligibility to the world. Herder and Hermann’s concerning about language rejects to accept mathematics as the basis of science and reason. Instead, the only first and last content and principle of reason is language. The modern conception of ‘hermeneutics’ derived from this linguistic turn.
Chapter 3 – German Idealism aims to rethinks the relationship between the subject and the object in Kant’s claims. The core of philosophy becomes the activity of the subject, not the explanation of the natural world of the object. German Idealism tries to find new way of clarifying the ‘unconditioned’ or the ‘Absolute’.
Chapter 4 – The problem revealed by the view of German Romantics is that knowing one has reached that final truth would entail a prior familiarity with that truth, otherwise it would be impossible to recognize that it is the final truth.
Chapter 5 – Marx’s key thought is that aggregations of individual human actions lead to unintended systematic consequences, By moving from barter to money exchange , the whole nature of society is transformed, because everything becomes potentially exchangeable for everything else. He thinks of the move beyond this world in terms of political and social revolution, in which the proletariat abolishes the system that oppresses it.
Chapter 6 – Arthur Schopenhauer’s ‘The World as Will and Representation’ is a work of thoroughgoing pessimism and atheism, which introduces a new tragic attention into modern philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche thinks the idea of this world is an illusion, and the alternative is ‘nihilism’. This situation generated ‘ressentiment’ by Christian ‘slave morality’ called by Nietzsche. Then he began to attempt to destroy and renew philosophy in the Western tradition which originated from Christianity and Platonism.
Chapter 7 – Neo Kantianist philosophers, the Marburg School reinterpreted Kant’s view of philosophy’s relationship to the natural science in the light of new scientific discoveries. Analytical philosophy, The second linguistic turn by Bernard Bolzano’s semantic approach led philosophy to the direction of the pragmatics of language. Gottlob Frege made advances in logic and created analytical philosophy, but it didn’t play the main role in German philosophy. On the other hand, nevertheless influenced by Frege, Edmund Husserl seeks a new way of describing philosophy and founded phenomenology. His concept of ‘pre- and extra-scientific life-world’ includes all actual life and the life of scientific thought, and emerges from a ‘self-enclosed world of ideal objectivities’.
Chapter 8 – Martin Heidegger asked what ‘being’ fundamentally means. His explanation of ‘being’ means something like ‘being accessible. We emerge into the world with subsequently investing with meaning, so the world we inhabit is always already meaningful. Our engagement with things isn’t based on the idea of what they essentially are, but rather it’s based on what we aim to do with them.
Chapter 9 – Critical Theory, following Marx, shifted the philosophical key concern from the relation of between human beings into relations between things. Theodor Adorno regard the modern world as a ‘universal context of delusion’ which fails controlling the advance of knowledge and technology, and became barbarism. But his pupil Jürgen Habermas claims that Adorno’s critical theory works with a conception of rationality as something purely instrumental, which excluded its communicative basis.
The characteristic of German philosophy is to face a tension extending and critically assessing the tradition from Kant onwards, and to see how philosophy can be used to address pressing social and political problems.

Author introduces and comments philosophers, schools and these theories of German philosophy almost chronologically from Kant to the critical theory of Frankfurt School. His main attention is how German philosophy have been formed and changed, and it have coped with society, politics, modernity, linguistic thought, culture, reason, enlightenment, knowledge, science, (German) philosophy itself and its tradition.
Author emphasizes German philosophy copes with matters of society, politics and ‘pragmatism’. But the description of this book is ambiguous and not easy. And it is idealistic and slightly complex like German philosophy.
Yet, this book is very useful for you to look over digests of isms, schools, theories, background and their transition of German philosophy. Also it’s helpful to concern the worth of German philosophy and difference of it to the Anglo-American analytical philosophy.

German Philosophy (Very Short Introductions)
Andrew Bowie
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 27 May 2010
152 pages, £7.99, $11.95
ISBN: 978-0199569250
Contents:
List of illustrations
Introduction: Why German Philosophy?
1. Kant and Modernity
2. The Linguistic Turn
3. German Idealism
4. ‘Early Romantic’ Philosophy
5. Marx
6. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and the ‘Death of God’
7. Neo-Kantianism, Analytical Philosophy, and Phenomenology
8. Heidegger
9. Critical Theory
References
Further Reading
Index

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