The very nature of German Idealism militates against sharply separating the many different fields in which it has had an immense impact. For obvious practical reasons, however, the essays in this volume on philosophy restrict themselves as much as is feasible to relatively pure and foundational issues, and so they refrain from directly engaging the more concrete social, aesthetic and religious topics that are treated in the other volumes of The Impact of Idealism. In addition, the essays that focus on science restrict themselves to the legacy of Idealist philosophy in a few of the most significant developments of recent centuries, and they do not attempt to review all the sciences in which Idealism has been influential. Each of the essays shows how a core philosophical notion is illuminated by a number of different writers, and typically in a way that reveals how the basic ideas of some important recent discussions can be understood as a reaction to a sequence of thought that goes back to more than one of the original Idealists.

Science and Idealism

In his review of developments in the mathematical and physical sciences Michael Friedman reconstructs the twists and turns by which Kant's notion of an a priori framework of constitutive and regulative principles led to Hermann Cohen's and Ernst Cassirer's neo-Kantian model of science as a ‘converging sequence of conceptual structures’ aimed at the construction of a ‘universal invariant theory of experience’. A major step in this development was Hermann von Helmholtz's call to return to the spirit of Kant's work by moving beyond the letter of a merely Euclidian and Newtonian conception of space and physical objects and towards a broader theory of the universal forces of attraction and repulsion. Friedman argues that this step was anticipated by Schelling's Naturphilosophie, which played an important catalytic role in early nineteenth-century science by indicating how the notion of opposing fundamental forces could be fruitfully expanded to the domain of electro-chemistry.