German idealism

German idealism is a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophical movement centered on reason, freedom, and the mind’s role in shaping experience.

Immanuel Kant: An eighteenth-century philosopher who argued that the mind actively structures experience and that reason has limits. His critical philosophy set the problem that German idealists sought to extend or overcome.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte: A German philosopher who grounded knowledge and action in the self-positing activity of the I. He recast Kant’s philosophy as a system beginning from the activity of the subject.
Dialectic: A mode of philosophical development in which tensions within a position lead to its transformation. Hegel uses dialectical development to explain how concepts and forms of life change.
Materialism: The view that matter is fundamental and that mental phenomena depend on material conditions. It reverses idealism’s emphasis on mind, reason, or spirit as fundamental to reality.
Transcendental idealism: Kant’s view that objects as experienced depend on the mind’s a priori forms, while things in themselves remain unknowable. It supplies the starting framework for later disputes about mind and reality.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling: A German philosopher who developed accounts of nature, freedom, and the identity of mind and reality. His changing systems connect the movement’s philosophies of nature and spirit.
Recognition: The social process through which people acknowledge one another as agents with standing and claims. Hegel treats mutual recognition as a condition for self-consciousness and social freedom.
Empiricism: The view that experience is the primary source of knowledge. German idealists argue that experience alone cannot explain its own necessary structures.
Thing-in-itself: In Kantian philosophy, reality considered independently of the conditions under which humans experience it. German idealists challenged whether Kant could consistently posit this unknowable reality.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: A German philosopher whose system explains reality and history through developing forms of thought and freedom. He gave German idealism its most comprehensive account of reason unfolding through history.

Linked from 41 pages