GERMAN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

Done by :
Ridkous Ruslana
  1. Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy.
  2. G. - W. - F. Hegel’s dialectical idealism.
  3. Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach’s
antropological materialism.
CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY

 The critical philosophy - movement,

attributed to Immanuel Kant (1724–
1802), sees the primary task
of philosophy as criticism rather than
justification of knowledge. Criticism, for
Kant, meant judging as to the possibilities
of knowledge before advancing to
knowledge itself. The basic task of
philosophers, according to this view, is
not to establish and demonstrate theories
about reality, but rather to subject all
theories—including those about
philosophy itself—to critical review, and
measure their validity by how well they
withstand criticism.
 "Critical philosophy" is also used as another name for Kant's
philosophy itself. Kant said that philosophy's proper inquiry is not
about what is out there in reality, but rather about the character and
foundations of experience itself. We must first judge how human
reason works, and within what limits, so that we can afterwards
correctly apply it to sense experience and determine whether it can
be applied at all to metaphysical objects.
KANT’S MAJOR CRITICAL WRITINGS
G. - W. - F. HEGEL’S DIALECTICAL IDEALISM

“Dialectics” is a term used to

describe a method of philosophical
argument that involves some sort of
contradictory process between
opposing sides.
 The form or presentation of logic,
he says, has three sides or
moments .These sides are not parts
of logic, but, rather, moments of
“every concept”, as well as “of
everything true in general”.
MOMENTS OF “EVERY CONCEPT”

The first moment—the moment of the

understanding—is the moment of fixity, in
which concepts or forms have a seemingly
stable definition or determination.
  The second moment—the “dialectical”
or “negatively rational” moment—is the
moment of instability. In this moment, a
one-sidedness or restrictedness in the
determination from the moment of
understanding comes to the fore, and the
determination that was fixed in the first
moment passes into its opposite. Hegel
describes this process as a process of
“self-sublation”.
MOMENTS OF “EVERY CONCEPT”
The third moment—the “speculative” or
“positively rational” moment—grasps the
unity of the opposition between the first
two determinations, or is the positive result
of the dissolution or transition of those
determinations. Although the speculative
moment negates the contradiction, it is a
determinate or defined nothingness
because it is the result of a specific
process. There is something particular
about the determination in the moment of
understanding—a specific weakness, or
some specific aspect that was ignored in its
one-sidedness or restrictedness—that leads
it to fall apart in the dialectical moment. 
LUDWIG ANDREAS VON FEUERBACH’S
ANTROPOLOGICAL MATERIALISM
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (28 July
1804 – 13 September 1872) was a
German philosopher and anthropologist 
best known for his book The Essence of
Christianity, which provided a critique
of Christianity that strongly influenced
generations of later thinkers. An
associate of Left Hegelian circles,
Feuerbach
advocated atheism and anthropological
materialism.Many of his philosophical
writings offered a critical analysis of
religion. His thought was influential in
the development of historical
materialism,where he is often
recognized as a bridge
between Hegel and Marx.
 His first book, Gedanken über Tod und
Unsterblichkeit (“Thoughts on Death and
Immortality”), was published anonymously.
In this work Feuerbach attacked the concept
of personal immortality and proposed a type
of immortality by which human qualities are
reabsorbed into nature. His Abälard und
Heloise (1834) and Pierre Bayle (1838) were
followed by Über Philosophie und
Christentum (1839; “On Philosophy and
Christianity”), in which he claimed “that
Christianity has in fact long vanished not
only from the reason but from the life of
mankind, that it is nothing more than a fixed
idea.”
 Continuing this view in his most important work, Das Wesen des
Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity), Feuerbach posited the
notion that man is to himself his own object of thought and
that religion is nothing more than a consciousness of the infinite.  In the
second section he analyzed the “false or theological essence of religion,”
contending that the view that God has an existence independent of
human existence leads to a belief in revelation and sacraments, which are
items of an undesirable religious materialism. Although Feuerbach
denied that he was an atheist, he nevertheless contended that the God of
Christianity is an illusion. As he expanded his discussion to
other disciplines, including philosophy, he came to see Hegel’s principles
as quasi-religious and embraced instead a form of materialism that Marx
subsequently criticized.