The path of philosophy: from the 17th to the 19th century (Trans. From German V. Terletskyi, O. Vedrov): Kyiv, Duh i Litera, 2009, 386 p.

The work of Prof. Wolfgang Röd, one of the leading contemporary historians of philosophy, depicts the manifold development of Modern philosophy. Beginning with the work of R. Descartes, who is justly considered the pioneer of modern philosophy, he examines the richness of ideas of this era and their modifications in the further development of philosophical thought in the Enlightenment, in the work of I. Kant and his first interpreters, as well as in German idealism. The originality of the author's approach is clearly manifested in the author's historico-philosophical framework, which, following the Kantian understanding of philosophy as a “theory of experience,” presents a modern reading of the history of philosophy through the prism of “critical philosophy.”

Due to the range of its topics, the book is of interest not only to philosophers, political scientists, historians, and lawyers, but will also be useful to all those who are not indifferent to the twists and turns of science, society, and culture in the 17th and 19th centuries.

CONTENTS

Preface
Preface to the Ukrainian edition

Part one: Modern philosophy before Kant
I. Philosophy of the 17th century
1. Descartes
а) Biography
b) The starting point of Cartesian philosophy
с) The ideal of knowledge and science
d) The main ideas of metaphysics
e) The principle of natural philosophy
f) Body and soul
g) Theory and practice
2. Anti-rationalist tendencies in the 17th century
a) Hobbes and Gassendi as critics of the “Meditations”
b) The foundations of Hobbes' philosophy
c) Hobbes' philosophy of the state
d) Pascal
3. Further development of Cartesianism
а) The impetus for the emergence of occasionalism
b) Arnold Geulincx
с) Nicolas Malebranche
4. Benedict de Spinoza
а) The life of Spinoza
b) Geometric order
с) Overcoming dualism
d) Justification of determinism
e) Degrees of cognition
f) Moral philosophy
g) The doctrine of the state
5. John Locke
а) Biographical information
b) Critique of rationalism
с) Foundations of the empirical theory of knowledge
d) Philosophy of the state and the program of liberal politics
e) The main provisions of the philosophy of religion
6. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
а) Life and work
b) The doctrine of monads
с) The principle of logic
d) Philosophy and religion

II. The Age of Enlightenment
1. The nature of the Enlightenment thought
а) On the concept of the Enlightenment
b) Shaftesbury as a forerunner of the Enlightenment
с) The Deists
2. Radicalization of empiricism
а) The combination of empiricism and religious speculation in Berkeley
b) Radicalization of empiricism in Hume
(1) Break with the theory of knowledge
(2) Hume's understanding of ethics
(3) The doctrine of law and state
(4) Critique of religion
с) Philosophy of “common sense” [common sense] 3.
3. The Enlightenment in France
а) Montesquieu
b) Voltaire
с) Diderot
d) Jean le Rond d'Alembert
e) Condillac and the school of Idéologues
f) Materialists
g) The beginnings of political economy
4. Enlightenment in Germany
a) Wolff and his supporters
b) Philosophy under the influence of Pietism
c) Lessing
5. Opponents of the Enlightenment
а) Giambattista Vico
b) Rousseau as a critic of intellectualism
(1) The life of the unadapted
(2) Understanding of nature
(3) Freedom and legal order
(4) Labor and property
6. Philosophy and social and political transformations at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
a) Enlightenment ideology of progress
b) The ideal of a new society based on the Enlightenment program
c) Reaction to the French Revolution: traditionalists, de Saint-Simon
d) The development of socialism from Fourier to Proudhon

Part Two: Kant and German Idealism
I. Kant's philosophy
1. Kant, Königsberg and the citizens of the world
2. The so-called pre-critical philosophy of Kant
3. The main ideas of the theory of reference
a) The question of the possibility of knowledge
b) Synthetic judgments a priori
c) Contemplation and concepts
d) Phenomena and things in themselves
4. The failure of traditional metaphysics: antinomies and paralogisms
5. Transcendental philosophy instead of transcendental metaphysics
6. The ethics of duty
a) Kantian ethics in the 1760s
b) Ethical formalism
c) Ethics and metaphysics
7. Law and state, history and politics
a) The main ideas of the doctrine of law and state
b) Philosophy of history
8. Doctrine of the beautiful and expedient
a) Expediency of nature
b) The beautiful and sublime
9. Philosophy of religion

III. Metaphysical and psychological interpretations of critical philosophy
1. Approach of critical philosophy to traditional metaphysics
a) Herbart's metaphysics of experience
b) The main ideas of Herbart's psychology
2. Psychological and anthropological interpretation of critical philosophy
a) Fries's psychological understanding of critique
b) Fries's school in the XIX and XX centuries
c) Beneke as a representative of psychologism
3. Linguistic and philosophical metacritique

III. From critical philosophy to idealism
1. Jacobi and the debate about spinozism
2. Jacobi's philosophy of faith
3. Maimon's understanding of transcendental philosophy
4. Reinhold's systematization of transcendental philosophy
5. The skeptical opposition

IV. Fichte
1. Life and works
2. Idealism and dogmatism
3. Idealism of the doctrine of science
a) The main provisions of the first form of the doctrine of science
b) The tendency of the later doctrine of science
4. Ethical life [Sittlichkeit] and law
a) The main provisions of moral philosophy
b) Philosophy of right and philosophy of state

V. Schelling
1. Life and evolution of thought
2. From the doctrine of science to natural philosophy
a) Self-philosophy
b) The experience of organic life
c) Intellectual contemplation
3. Speculative doctrine of nature
4. Philosophy of identity
5. Theosophy and “positive philosophy”
a) The formation of the world as the formation of God
b) Philosophy of revelation

VI. Hegel
1. Life and works of Hegel
2. Hegel's theological starting point
3. Phenomenology of spirit
a) The problem of cognition
b) Forms of consciousness
(1) Object consciousness
(2) Self-consciousness
(3) Dialectics as the dynamics of theories
4.System: logic, natural philosophy, philosophy of spirit
a) The science of logic
b) Nature and the spiritual world
5. Philosophy of right and philosophy of state
a) Reality and reason
b) Family, civil society, state
6. Art, religion and history
a) Art
b) Religion
c) World history
7. The historical significance of Hegelianism

VII. Schopenhauer
1. The life of an outsider
2. Endeavors in critical philosophy
3. Will as a thing in itself
4. The good, the beautiful, and liberation
a) The ethics of compassion
b) Basic ideas of aesthetics
c) The doctrine of liberation
5. Schopenhauer's place in the history of philosophy

NOTES
LITERATURE
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
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