Top Frederick C. Beiser Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Frederick C. Beiser Biography

Frederick Charles Beiser (/ˈbaɪzər/; born November 27, 1949) is an American author and professor of philosophy at Syracuse University. He is one of the leading English language scholars of German Idealism. In addition to his writings on German Idealism, Beiser has also written on the German Romantics and 19th-century British philosophy. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research in 1994, and was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2015.

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Frederick C. Beiser Quotes

The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i. e. , that we know nothing more than our own representations.

Attempt, Idealism, Nihilism, Nothing, Struggle, Subjectivism

The aesthetic dimension of the ideal state comes out in the idea of harmony, which is the classical idea of beauty as "concinnitas" or "unity-in-variety".

Beauty, Concinnitas, Dimensions, Ideal, Ideas, Unity

When Hume insists that taste is a matter of delicacy, that it is a matter of having a sensitivity to features of an object itself, he is very close to the rationalist doctrine. Hume was really a covert objectivist (or partial one) about aesthetic pleasure because that pleasure had to be based on the sensitivity to features in the object.

Delicacy, Doctrine, Insists, Matter, Pleasure, Rationalist

The romantics were reacting against a modern culture that divided individuals from themselves (through specialisation in the division of labor), from others (the competitive market place) and from nature, which had been reduced down to a machine through technology. The antidote to such division is unity and wholeness, which means feeling at home again in the world.

Home, Machine, Mean, Specialisation, Technology

The idea of romanticising the world goes back to the idea of creating a harmonious whole where the individual will feel at one with himself, others and nature.

Back, Creating, Ideas, Romanticising, World

There is no comfortable middle path where we get to provide a rational justification for our basic moral, religious and common sense beliefs.

Basic, Common Sense, Middle Path, Moral, Religious

The connection between romantic politics and aesthetics is plain in Schiller's and Novalis's concept of the aesthetic or poetic state.

Aesthetics, Connections, Plain, Poetic, Romantic, States

To live well is to live in harmony with ourselves, others and nature, and that idea of harmony is, of course, an aesthetic one.

Aesthetic, Course, Harmony, Ideas, Live Well

The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.

Mean, Nihilism, Philosophy, Struggled

You only have to talk to artists to see that they work according to rules, and that they know all too well that they can employ only certain means to achieve the ends they want.

Artist, Artists, Ends, Mean, Rules, Want

Schiller never wanted to replace the moral with the aesthetic but he did want the moral to be one part of the aesthetic. He rightly notes the aesthetic dimension of morality, that we use concepts like grace to characterise people who do their duty with ease and pleasure.

Concepts, Grace, Morality, People, Use

There was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason.

Reason, Scotsmen, Stop, Swift, Territory

The romantics really did want to romanticise the world itself, and that meant re-creating the state, society and even nature so that it became a work of art.

Art, Became, Creating, Romantics, Society, World

Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i. e. , god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite, of the universe as a whole, i. e, god. You cannot get more metaphysical than that. I think that Hegel scholars have to admit this basic fact rather than burying their heads in the sand and trying to pretend that Hegel is concerned with conceptual analysis, category theory, normativity or some such contemporary fad.

Admit, Fact, Philosophy, Telling, Thinking, Trying

Royce is the father of the thesis that German idealism is a story about the discovery and development of the Kantian transcendental ego - the "I" that accompanies all my representations - as an absolute cosmic supersubject who, god-like, creates the entire universe.

Cosmic, Discovery, Ego, Father, Kantian

The absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed.

Ideas, Intellectual, Objective, Structure, Subsumed