History and Freedom in German Idealism

Harvard FAS

The high period of German Idealism -- from 1781, the year of the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, to the death of Hegel in 1831 -- was one of the great revolutionary epochs in the history of philosophy, and, not coincidentally, in politics and culture. We shall study the thought of the period using the central notions of history and freedom as a guiding thread. Our modern conceptions of religion, art and society were all shaped by the ideas about history and human agency that…