Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism
These are excellent lectures and make a valuable and exciting book. Henrich certainly gives a better introduction to the philosophizing that took place between Kant and Hegel than any other that I know of. He wants to show that the positions of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel each represent an option that is still open for live philosophical debate. Can there be a single-track systematic philosophy encompassing nature as well as mind? Dieter Henrich shows how this develops into a wide-ranging problem, allowing both for criticism of Kant and for constructive moves made after the criticisms are taken into account. He thus tries to show us argumentative steps by which one might proceed from a Kantian position to a Fichtean and then on to an Hegelian view. These lectures were given in 1973. Much has been done in English on Hegel since then, but relatively little on the "between" period which Dieter Henrich addresses. This is not an ordinary textbook. It's very much infused with Dieter Henrich's own philosophical views. The topics and people Dieter Henrich discusses he really illuminates, both in terms of the historical context and in terms of the soundness or lack of it of the philosophy he is discussing. He is himself deeply inside that tradition, yet knows enough about the work of those outside it to make quite comprehensible to the outsiders what it's like on the inside. (J. B. Schneewind, Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University)Dieter Henrich'sBetween Kant and Hegelis one of those rare scholarly works by which others are, and will be, judged, just as Henrich's scholarship more generally provides a standard by which others in the area of German Idealism have been judged for no less than thirty years. (Garth W. GreenReview of Metaphysics2005-12-01)Belong[s] in the library of every serious student of German idealism. With this volume, Henrich has made a sophisticated, original, and altogether welcome contribution to the interpretation of philosophy between Kant and Hegel. (Daniel BreazealeJournal of the History of Philosophy2008-04-01)