Idealism and realism

Richard Kroner's monumental study of German Idealism, From Kant to Hegel, portrays that philosophical movement as a teleological process brought under way by Kant, originally advanced, in different ways, by Fichte and Schelling, and culminating in the universal synthesis of all prior views and standpoints that is Hegel's system. This linear, progressivist, and finalist perspective is informed by Hegel's self-understanding of his place at the end of the history of philosophy and owes much to Hegel's own work in writing the history of philosophy in general and the history of modern philosophy in particular. But it has not remained the only, or even the dominant, reading of German Idealism. Over the past few decades a number of philosophers and scholars have argued for the superior role of Schelling in the later development of German Idealism and sought to show that it was with Schelling and not Hegel that the movement reached its deepest and most far-reaching insights. Similarly, there has been a reassessment of the place that Fichte occupies through his later works in the history of German Idealism. Finally, even Schopenhauer, once excluded from the German idealist canon, has been incorporated into a more comprehensively conceived genealogy of classical German philosophy between Kant and Hegel.