History of Modern Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 841 pages of information about History of Modern Philosophy.

History of Modern Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 841 pages of information about History of Modern Philosophy.

[Footnote 1:  On Krause cf.  P. Hohlfeld, Die Krausesche Philosophic, 1879; B. Martin, 1881; R. Eucken, Zur Erinnerung an Krause, Festrede, 1881.  From his posthumous works Hohlfeld and Wuensche have published the Lectures on Aesthetics, the System of Aesthetics (both 1882), and numerous other treatises.]

%3.  The Philosophers of Religion.%

Franz (von) Baader, the son of a physician, was born in Munich in 1765, resided there as superintendent of mines, and, from 1826, as professor of speculative dogmatics, and died there also in 1841.  His works, which consisted only of a series of brief treatises, were collected (16 vols., 1851-60) by his most important adherent, Franz Hoffman[1] (at his death in 1881 professor in Wuerzburg).  Baader may be characterized as a mediaeval thinker who has worked through the critical philosophy, and who, a believing, yet liberal Catholic, endeavors to solve with the instruments of modern speculation the old Scholastic problem of the reconciliation of faith and knowledge.  His themes are, on the one hand, the development of God, and, on the other, the fall and redemption, which mean for him, however, not merely inner phenomena, but world-events.  He is in sympathy with the Neoplatonists, with Augustine, with Thomas Aquinas, with Eckhart, with Paracelsus, above all, with Jacob Boehme, and Boehme’s follower Louis Claude St. Martin (1743-1804), but does not overlook the value of the modern German philosophy.  With Kant he begins the inquiry with the problem of knowledge; with Fichte he finds in self-consciousness the essence, and not merely a property, of spirit; with Hegel he looks on God or the absolute spirit not only as the object, but also as the subject of knowledge.  He rejects, however, the autonomy of the will and the spontaneity of thought; and though he criticises the Cartesian separation between the thought of the creator and that of the creature, he as little approves the pantheistic identification of the two—­human cognition participates in the divine, without constituting a part of it.

[Footnote 1:  Besides Hoffman, Lutterbeck and Hamberger have described and expounded Baader’s system.  See also Baumann’s paper in the Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xiv., 1878, p. 321 seq.]

In accordance with its three principal objects, “God, Nature, and Man,” philosophy divides into fundamental science (logic or the theory of knowledge and theology), the philosophy of nature (cosmology or the theory of creation and physics), and the philosophy of spirit (ethics and sociology).  In all its parts it must receive religious treatment.  Without God we cannot know God.  In our cognition of God he is at once knower and known; our being and all being is a being known by him; our self-consciousness is a consciousness of being known by God:  cogitor, ergo cogito et sum; my being and thinking are based on my being thought by God.  Conscience is a joint knowing

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History of Modern Philosophy from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.