The legacy of post-Kantian German thought
German Idealism has been arguably the most influential force in philosophy over the past two hundred years. Particularly in its most influential form, the mature philosophy of Hegel, it provided the backdrop against which most of the major figures in the modern German intellectual tradition developed their own ideas, from Marx and Nietzsche to Heidegger, Adorno and Habermas. Reactions against that tradition, such as Neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and existentialism, have all found it an essential point of reference. Already in Kant's lifetime his revolution also began to affect other fields on which in the nineteenth century Idealism was to be a shaping force: dogmatic, historical, and Biblical theology, the philosophy of history, art and literature, legal, social, educational, and political thinking. In Britain and America reception of post-Kantian thought led to the growth of local variants of Idealism, especially among intellectuals detached from Christianity. Since the advent of post-structuralism the currents emanating from Heidegger's writings have led to a new wave of Idealist inheritance in other non-German (especially French and American) intellectual cultures.
The field of intellectual enquiry encompassed by Idealism and its aftermath is immense, and large sections of modern scholarship across the humanities have been dedicated to exploring aspects of it. Simply the literature in English and German on philosophy around 1800 accounts for a highly significant proportion of scholarship in modern intellectual history, and is constantly expanding, while post-Kantian Idealism's long trajectory in the modern intellectual tradition continues to be recognised. And that trajectory goes far beyond philosophy itself: much work across the humanities, on subjects ranging from the history of science to legal theory, political philosophy to comparative literature, concerns itself with aspects of the Idealist aftermath. Yet although so many areas of scholarship touch on the legacy of Idealism, a major lacuna exists: we lack a comprehensive account of that legacy, sensitive both to the overall picture of Idealism's impact—its development through highly various forms of intellectual and imaginative enquiry—and the specialist awareness necessary to treat the many different stages of that impact.
"The Impact of Idealism" fills this gap. It is a three-year research project combining interaction and exchange of ideas, through workshops and a major conference, with a written output—a two-volume publication —that aims to serve as a definitive account for years to come. The account provided in these volumes is not determined in advance, but will rather be the product of discursive and collaborative research. The project's major aim is to relate texts, figures and periods to the full context of Idealism and its aftermath, and this will entail important shifts of emphasis and divergences from standard practices of interdisciplinarity in this area: while the field currently has many accounts to offer of isolated aspects of that legacy, there is no sense of overall perspective, and isolated works on particular thinkers or writers, and works which trace highly specific connections over time, are necessarily unable to provide a picture of how their subject fits into the context of developments taking place over two centuries and extending into several areas of intellectual enquiry.
