"Critique has been a central theme in the German philosophical tradition since the publication of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Some successors turned Kant's critique against itself and used it to challenge the authority of his system. Others extended his critique, applying it to aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy and generating new forms of criticism that were then taken up by Idealism, Romanticism, Marxism, Neo-Kantianism, Phenomenology, and Critical Theory. Yet these various legacies of Kantian critique are rarely brought into dialogue. Critique in German Philosophy seeks to address this problem by exploring the figures, works, movements, and philosophical subfields that have contributed to the development of the concept of critique in German philosophy, as well as their relation to one another. In so doing, it also challenges the standard ways philosophers have understood the task of philosophical critique. Attending to both canonical and previously overlooked texts and thinkers, the contributors bring to light alternative conceptions of critique in the German philosophical tradition with profound implications. In offering a critical revision of the history of modern European philosophy, the volume also raises new questions about what it means for philosophy to be "critical" today"--.

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
  • 1. Kant and German Idealism
  • 2. German Romanticism
  • 3. Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche
  • 4. Neo-Kantianism, Phenomenology, and Critical Theory
  • 5. Critical Theory Today
  • Notes
• 1 The Struggle between Dogmatism and Skepticism in the Prussian Academy: A Precedent for Kantian Critique
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Crousaz and the Prussian Anti-skeptical Academy
  • 3. Toward the Critical Attitude: Skeptical Arguments against Skepticism
  • 4. Kant’s Critique and the Maturity of Reason
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Notes
• 2 Pure Sensibility as a Source of Corruption: Kant’s Critique of Metaphysics in the Inaugural Dissertation and Critique of Pure Reason
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Kant’s Notion of Critique in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and the Inaugural Dissertation
  • 3. The Notion of Critique in the Critique of Pure Reason
  • 4. The Purification and Self-Limitation of Metaphysics
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Notes
• 3 Critique in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason: Why This Critique Is Not a Critique of Pure Practical Reason
  • 1. The Moral Law
  • 2. The Highest Good
  • 3. The Antinomy of Practical Reason
  • 4. The Complete Good
  • Notes
• 4 On an Aesthetic Dimension of Critique: The Time of the Beautiful in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters
  • 1. From a Critique of Aesthetics to Aesthetics as Critique
  • 2. A Standstill at the Greatest Tension: Aesthetics as a Critical Dimension
  • 3. The Time of the Beautiful: An Aesthetic Dimension of Critique
  • Notes
• 5 Not Yet a System, Not Yet a Science: Reinhold and Fichte on Kant’s Critique
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
  • 3. Reinhold’s Elementary Philosophy
  • 4. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre
  • 5. Critique, System, Science
  • Notes
• 6 Schelling’s Philosophical Letters on Doctrine and Critique
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Kant’s Distinction
  • 3. Fichte’s Identity Claim
  • 4. Schelling’s First Premise
  • 5. Schelling’s Second Premise
  • Notes
• 7 Critique With a Small C: Herder’s Critical Philosophical Practice and Anticritical Polemics
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. “The Title is Alienating”
  • 3. “One Does Not Criticize a Natural Capacity”
  • 4. “One Criticizes Arts and Sciences as Products of Human Beings”
  • Notes
• 8 Irony and the Possibility of Romantic Criticism: Friedrich Schlegel as Poet-Critic
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Irony and the Critical Stance
  • 3. Romantic Criticism and the Limits of Comprehension
  • 4. Conclusion
  • Notes
• 9 Alexander von Humboldt: A Critic of Nature
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The Task of the Critic: Concretizing Natural Beauty
  • 3. The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature through Thick and Thin
  • 4. Assimilation and the Task of the Critic
  • Notes
• 10 Critique, Refutation, Appropriation: Strategies of Hegel’s Dialectic
  • 1. Transformative Appropriation
  • 2. Refutation
  • 3. Freedom as “Frei Entlassen”
  • Notes
• 11 Abstraction and Critique in Marx: The Case of Debt
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Exploitation-cum-Expropriation
  • 3. Value, Anti-Value
  • 5. Concluding Remarks
  • Notes
• 12 Nietzsche’s Project of Reevaluation: What Kind of Critique?
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Internalist and Externalist Interpretations of Nietzsche’s Critique of Morality
    • 2.1. Nietzsche’s Target Audience
    • 2.2. The Novelty of Umwertung
    • 2.3. The Scope of Umwertung
    • 2.4. The Novelty and the Scope of the Problems Combined
  • 3. Genealogy and Umwertung
  • 4. Concluding Remarks
  • Notes
• 13 Kantian Critique, Its Ethical Purification by Hermann Cohen, and Its Reflective Transformation by Wilhelm Dilthey
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The Three Kinds of Critique in Kant
  • 3. Kant on Rightful Ownership in a World of Limited Resources
  • 4. Cohen on Property Rights and Contractual Justice
  • 5. Bringing Ethics Down to Earth and Into a Multicultural World
  • 6. Dilthey’s Formative Social Ethics and the Reflective Commitment to What Is Right
  • 7. Conclusion
  • Notes
• 14 Transcendental Phenomenology as Radical Immanent Critique: Subversions and Matrices of Intelligibility
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Matters of Distance
  • 3. Conceivability, Inconceivability, Difference as Conflict
  • 4. The Imagining Stance: From Substantial to Modal Concepts and Norms
  • 5. Working through the Tension: Transcendental Impossibility and Normalized Inconceivability
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Notes
• 15 From the Metaphysics of Law to the Critique of Violence
  • 1. From the Metaphysics of Law …
  • 2. … To the Critique of Violence
  • Notes
• 16 Is There Critique in Critical Theory? The Claim of Happiness on Theory
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Traditional and Critical Theory
  • 3. Critique, Rescue, and the Index of Happiness
  • Notes
• 17 Critique as Melancholy Science
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Adorno’s Conception of Natural History
  • 3. Natural History and Historical Ontology
  • 4. Critique as Melancholy Science
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Notes
• 18 Reality and Resistance: Habermas and Haslanger on Objectivity, Social Critique, and the Possibility of Change
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Truth, Reality, Objectivity
  • 3. Resisting Reality and Critique
  • 4. Impediments to Critique and the Possibility of Change
  • Notes
• 19 The Critique of Law and the Law of Critique
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The Aporia of Critique
  • 3. Critique as Genealogy
  • 4. Beyond Contingency
  • 5. The Paradox of Law
  • 6. Undogmatic Normativity
  • 7. Conclusion
  • Notes
• Works Cited
• Contributors
• Index