Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard

Abstract

Abstract This book traces a complex of issues surrounding moral agency from Kant through Schelling to Kierkegaard. There are two complementary projects. The first is to clarify the contours of German idealism as a philosophical movement by examining the motivations not only of its beginning, but also of its end. In tracing the motivations for the transition to mid-19th century post-idealism to Schelling’s middle and late periods and, ultimately, back to a problem originally presented in Kant, it shows the causes of the demise of that movement to be the same as the causes of its rise. In the process, it presents the most detailed discussion to date of the moral psychology and moral epistemology of Schelling’s work after 1809. The second project — which is simply the first viewed from a different angle — is to trace the sources of Kierkegaard’s theory of agency and his criticism of philosophical ethics to this same complex of issues in Kant and post-Kantian idealism. In the process, it is argued that Schelling’s influence on Kierkegaard was greater than has been thought, and builds a new understanding of Kierkegaard’s project in his pseudonymous works on the basis of this revised picture of their historical background.