Johann Friedrich Herbart

Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy

Frederick C Beiser author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:3rd Feb '22

Should be back in stock very soon

Johann Friedrich Herbart cover

Though little known today, Johann Friedrich Herbart was one of the leading philosophers of his age, the competitor of Schelling and Hegel. Although he was trained by Fichte, Herbart soon became a critic of the idealist tradition and developed a philosophy antithetical to it. His own philosophy was opposed to the idealist tradition in important respects: he defended a dualism between the factual and normative; he was an ontological pluralist rather than monist; and he accepted crucial Kantian dualisms that had been rejected by the idealists. Herbart was also an important forerunner of analytic philosophy, first in breaking with the idealist tradition, and second in insisting that the proper method of philosophy is the analysis of concepts rather than speculation about the universe as a whole. In the first intellectual biography of Herbart in English, Frederick C. Beiser studies the development of one of 19th-century Germany's most important philosophers, from his education in Oldenburg and Jena to his final years in Göttingen.

This volume . . . contributes much to a deeper knowledge of philosophy in the nineteenth century. It should be warmly welcomed and much appreciated, constituting an absolutely necessary purchase for all academic libraries. Its subject—Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841)—has been, heretofore, utterly lost to academic philosophy. This, the first English language publication in decades, and the only one in English to give full prominence to his philosophy, is truly a major accomplishment. * David Sullivan, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *
Beiser (Syracuse Univ.) has written an outstanding biography of Herbart, who was the first to regard philosophy as the analysis of concepts. * Choice *

ISBN: 9780192849854

Dimensions: 242mm x 162mm x 23mm

Weight: 626g

336 pages