This chapter considers the place of Jacobi’s thought within the history of philosophy. Despite the prominent dismissal of his thought as unsystematic, misologist, and effectively incompatible with scientific philosophy, Jacobi’s critique of rationalist philosophy aptly situates him within the tradition of philosophical skepticism.

“Nature” refers variously to (1) the specific domain of scientific research, or (2) the correlate of a more poetic mode of being-in-the-world (associated especially with Hölderlin). While the term appears numerous times in Heidegger’s corpus, extended discussions of it are surprisingly infrequent.

Resoluteness is a modified way of living in the world that, rather than carrying on in conformity with generic identities and social expectation, organizes the way the concrete situation for action appears so that it sustains and guides one in the project of being one’s own individual self.

The aim of this chapter is to arrive at an understanding of Fichte’s metaethics that integrates two parallel accounts of what he variously called the “instinct of reason” (in the Wissenschaftslehre nova method lectures, 1796–1798) and our “moral nature” (in the System of Ethics of 1798). The chapter first characterizes Fichte’s metaethics as theoretical (i.e., not directly concerned with practical deliberation or action) and idealist (i.e., as avoiding both naturalist and supernaturalist metaphysics along with causal explanation in general). While it is accurate to label Fichte’s approach “transcendental,” the chapter argues that both accounts ultimately introduce a theological element, namely, the idea of God. The role of God turns out to be a “necessary idea” within Fichte’s genetic explanation of our moral nature, without reducing to any form of supernaturalist metaphysics.

Prior to Hegel’s portrayal of the French Revolution’s “fanaticism for destruction,” F. H. Jacobi criticized the impoverished, abstract conception of reason that he sees realized in the politics, philosophy, and broader intellectual culture of the era.Inaugurating a tradition of reflection in German thought, Jacobi labels this conception “nihilism.” While Jacobi identifies and analyzes both the theoretical and the practical sides of nihilism, its basic sense is practical.Practical nihilism equates ideal rationality with the realization of a pure form, minus the “way of sensing [Sinnesart]” that allows us to see what is at stake in any situation. Jacobi further argues that one’s “way of sensing” is the source of individuality and so of one’s irreplaceable value as a person. For Jacobi, the otherwise diverse group including the French philosophes, Kant, and Fichte all exemplify practical nihilism in some manner or other.This account starts from Jacobi’s initial reactions to the French Revolution, eventually captured by the letter “To Erhard O.” (1792). This discussion establishes the core of Jacobi’s objection to his era’s dominant conception of rationality.The open letter “To Fichte” (1799) in which the charge of nihilism first appears is explicable against this decades-old concern on Jacobi’s part.

The twentieth-century “Continental” philosophical tradition – descended from the likes of Fichte, Feuerbach, Marx, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche – exhibits a surprising feature: Nearly every variety of Continental philosophy (including phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, critical theory) has been brought to bear on traditional questions in the philosophy of religion as well as on questions unique to the cultural milieu of the post-war world. Periodicals and monographs, professional organizations and ad hoc symposia alike bear witness to creative forays into the philosophy of religion that would have scandalized the nineteenth-century progenitors of this direction of thinking.