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Literature and Philosophy

In: English and Literature

Submitted By Tanisanjida
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The Enlightenment in Germany: Aufklarung

1. The next major direction and impact upon philosophy will come from the German Enlightenment or Aufklarung.

2. Germany of the 18th Century was quite different from both England and France.

a. It had no rising middle class that demanded and fought for autonomy and power against the king.

b. Germany had not taken part in the new commercial and industrial revolutions.

c. Germany had not seen their social, economic, and political structures transformed that in England and France had culminated in the Revolution of 1688 and 1789.

3. Germany had remained feudal, agricultural, and rural while England and France had become industrialized and urban.

4. It had no political unity: Germany was a collection of dukedoms, baronial estates, imperial cities and principalities (* absolutist and authoritarian).

5. The Lutheran Church had remained the dominant force in the cultural life of Germany.

a. Science and technology had not developed sufficiently to have any social or philosophical importance.

b. The new science of Newton seemed incapable of explaining anything more than material and mechanical matters.

It could not be the sole means for arriving at knowledge.
6. Most German Philosophers of the 18th Century regarded David Hume (radical empiricism) as reducing all rational truths and scientific laws to animal faith (instinct).

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

1. Out of this provincial German culture and intellectual background came Kant who provided for the first time a philosophical answer to Hume's's skepticism.

2. The Critique of Pure Reason published by Kant in 1781.

a. Kant saw the logical outcome of Hume's radical empiricism.

b. Radical empiricism claims that the basis of all knowledge lies in experience -- this, to Kant, leads to the conclusion that there is no knowledge.

c. There is

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