Anna Ezekiel - Böcker

At the start of the nineteenth century, Karoline von Günderrode burst onto the German intellectual scene with multi-genre collections of philosophical literature that were read by Goethe, Clemens Brentano, and other famous writers and academics. But Günderrode's philosophical insights were largely ignored or adopted without credit and in 1806 she died by suicide, leaving behind a small but powerful set of reflections on the nature of the self, friendship, life after death, human-nature relations, social progress, epistemology, religion, ethics, and many other topics. Long celebrated as an embodiment of tragic Romantic poetry, Günderrode has recently been rediscovered as the author of an original and exciting philosophy. Günderrode was a nuanced thinker with a gift for using literary forms to engage readers with philosophical ideas. This volume makes many of Günderrode's most significant published and unpublished works, along with excerpts from her letters and notes on philosophical topics, available for the first time in English. The short introductions accompanying each text explicate the ideas embedded in Günderrode's writing, connecting them to intellectual debates of the day and to relevant work by better-known philosophers including Kant, Plato, Schelling, Herder, Schleiermacher, Hemsterhuis, Schlegel, and Novalis. The general introduction provides a more comprehensive orientation to Günderrode's philosophy, considering her metaphysics, epistemology, social and political thought, ethics, aesthetics, and reflections on gender, death, friendship, and human identity.

At the start of the nineteenth century, Karoline von Günderrode burst onto the German intellectual scene with multi-genre collections of philosophical literature that were read by Goethe, Clemens Brentano, and other famous writers and academics. But Günderrode's philosophical insights were largely ignored or adopted without credit and in 1806 she died by suicide, leaving behind a small but powerful set of reflections on the nature of the self, friendship, life after death, human-nature relations, social progress, epistemology, religion, ethics, and many other topics. Long celebrated as an embodiment of tragic Romantic poetry, Günderrode has recently been rediscovered as the author of an original and exciting philosophy. Günderrode was a nuanced thinker with a gift for using literary forms to engage readers with philosophical ideas. This volume makes many of Günderrode's most significant published and unpublished works, along with excerpts from her letters and notes on philosophical topics, available for the first time in English. The short introductions accompanying each text explicate the ideas embedded in Günderrode's writing, connecting them to intellectual debates of the day and to relevant work by better-known philosophers including Kant, Plato, Schelling, Herder, Schleiermacher, Hemsterhuis, Schlegel, and Novalis. The general introduction provides a more comprehensive orientation to Günderrode's philosophy, considering her metaphysics, epistemology, social and political thought, ethics, aesthetics, and reflections on gender, death, friendship, and human identity.

Hope is understood to be a significant part of human experience, including for motivating behaviour, promoting happiness, and justifying a conception of the self as having agency. Yet substantial gaps remain regarding the development of the concept of hope in the history of philosophy. This collection addresses this gap by reconstructing and analysing a variety of approaches to hope in late 18th- and 19th-century German philosophy.In 1781, Kant’s idea of a “rational hope” shifted the terms of discussion about hope and its role for human self-understanding. In the 19th century, a wide-ranging debate over the meaning and function of hope emerged in response to his work. Drawing on expertise from a diverse group of contributors, this collection explores perspectives on hope from Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, J. S. Beck, J. C. Hoffbauer, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Georg Friedrich Creuzer, Kierkegaard and others. Chapters consider different aspects of the concept of hope, including the rationality of hope, appropriate and inappropriate applications of hope and the function of hope in relation to religion and society.The result is a valuable collection covering a century of the role of hope in shaping cognitive attitudes and constructing social, political and moral communities. As an overview of philosophical approaches to hope during this period, including by philosophers who are seldom studied today, the collection constitutes a valuable resource for exploring the development of this important concept in post-Kantian German philosophy.