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Lewis was interested in the medieval heavens both from an academic and an imaginative perspective. The pagan gods, to his mind, were aesthetically beautiful and also apologetically useful, and Ptolemaic astrology was deemed consonant with Christianity until at least the sixteenth century (Dante being chief among those poets who Christianized it). The seven planets Lewis regarded as spiritual symbols of permanent value, able to convey truths relating to psychology, rationality, and novitas. Lewis's Idealism and his dislike of spiritual introspection pertinent to the question of Enjoyment of these symbols. Contemplating the planets and their influences in the Chronicles of Narnia.

The problem of occasion: why did Lewis write the Chronicles of Narnia? Writing was always the way to freedom for him, and the debate about Naturalism with Elizabeth Anscombe at the Socratic Club caused him difficulties which may have required mental and imaginative liberation. In Miracles, his defence of Idealism, he had argued that human reason was monarchical and that Naturalists preferred to live in a democratic universe. In part, the first Narnia Chronicle was written to demonstrate the same case imaginatively as he had made propositionally in his apologetics.

The main focus in this chapter is the relationship between Plotinus' ontology and his epistemology. It is argued that at the level of Intellect being and knowledge coincide, that to be is to be known or thought. It is further argued that this is a necessary consequence of a principle in Plotinus' philosophy claiming that to know something as it is in itself is to know that thing from its internal activity, and that this kind of knowledge is impossible unless the activity of the knower coincides with the activity constituting the being known.

This chapter expounds Kant’s view of space in contrast to those of Newton and Leibniz, and explains how Kant was led to this view by an argument from geometry. It explains how his view of the ideality of space led to his broader doctrine of Transcendental Idealism. It offers criticisms of Transcendental Idealism in its strong form and proposes a philosophically more defensible “weak” form of Transcendental Idealism.

This chapter examines “Proustian jokes” of the kind that gives pause for thought rather than to inflict a wound. Most of the mad beliefs in À la recherche du temps perdu are droll as well as crazy, and have their place in what is often and rightly said of the novel, that, among so many other things, it is also a great comic novel. The chapter considers examples of Proustian jokes that it suggests also reveal some of the key sources and terms of Marcel Proust's own aesthetic: the idioms of philosophical Idealism, the practice of naming one thing as another, the transposition of one order of sensation to another, and the drama of the unfinished or unfinishable sentence. It argues that the target of self-directed humor in the Recherche is not just an empirical self but the category of Self and the risk-laden practices of self-talk.

This chapter explores Manfred Frank's work, especially his recent study Selbstgefühl. With its very careful systematic and historical focus on the peculiar phenomenon of immediate self-awareness, this work is a paradigm of the kind of detailed reconstruction of early phases of the Idealist era for which Frank is especially well known. The phenomenon of this kind of awareness suddenly became a main topic in the late 18th century, and now it has become a center of attention throughout continental philosophy and contemporary analytic philosophy as well.

This chapter builds on the contrast between Hume and Kant by showing how the Critical philosophy can be understood as an ally of Reid's critique of empiricism and the whole tradition of the ‘way of ideas’. The general ‘anti-Cartesian’ and realist approach of Reid's common-sense philosophy has gained many distinguished adherents, but most analytic philosophers have continued to assume that this approach is the very opposite of Kant's. By building on extensive research by Manfred Kuehn on the role of common-sense philosophy in 18th-century Germany, it is argued that there has been a deep misunderstanding concerning passages that have been repeatedly taken to prove that Kant's philosophy completely opposes Reid's. Moreover, it is argued that common sense plays a crucial role in the first stage of Kant's system (in his theoretical and practical philosophy as well as his aesthetics), and that historical research has established that this fact was clearly recognized by a significant circle of early Kantians who worked in Jena right before the full development of German Idealism.

This chapter combines an analysis of the structure of Kant's critique of earlier metaphysics with a historical account of how this critique could have had as its fate the remarkable rise of a new kind of metaphysics in the era of German Idealism. It begins with the general observation that the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason does not attempt, let alone accomplish, the kind of complete destruction of metaphysics that many of its readers have supposed. Many traditional transcendent metaphysical ideas are allowed to be not only coherent but also assertable, once the demands of regulative and practical reason are allowed to supplement the thoughts of constitutive theoretical reason. Moreover, the Critique's stress on notions such as idealism, things in themselves, and the ‘unconditioned’ created (as William Hamilton noted) a ‘spectre’ that ‘haunted’ and stimulated German Idealism's new metaphysics of the ‘absolute’. Although Kant offers a radical critique of all earlier systems of a spiritualist or materialist kind, he also believes that something metaphysical should be affirmed beyond the spatiotemporal features of our experience. It is argued that for both Kant and German Idealism, this metaphysics is at least not any kind of subjectivism, and it need not present a special threat to most of our common realist beliefs.

This chapter outlines the history of Poland from the final loss of independence in 1795 to the November Uprising of 1830. Cultural developments taking place during the periods of the Duchy of Warsaw and Congress Kingdom are placed within their historical and economic contexts. Attention is given to the debate between the proponents of Classicism, supporting the rationalist ideology; and the supporters of Romanticism, headed by Mickiewicz who embrace idealism. Polish Romantic ideology is specifically manifested through the birth of the Slavophile doctrine, the restoration of Sarmatism, and efforts to construct and uphold national identity.

This chapter defends a version of philosophical Idealism as the most promising way in which to explicate the idea that human lives can be distinctively meaningful, while avoiding dualistic conceptions of mind or soul.

German idealists such as Friedrich Schelling and theologians such as Wilhelm Benecke and Julius Müller build on Kant's foundation of preexistence as a basis for freedom. Joseph Smith makes Mormonism (Latter-day Saints) the only Christian denomination to embrace preexistence. Edward Beecher gives the doctrine its fullest exposition ever.

This chapter focuses on the proponents of state power, who belonged to what can loosely be termed the Liberal Anglican tradition in English political thought. This tradition propounded a moral, organic state which embodied the whole national community. It held that Christianity had an essential role to play in providing common social values for the state, and that this was best accomplished through a national Church. It envisaged a tightly knit society, repudiating class conflict, and emphasizing the importance of education for the individual and society. Its roots lay in the 1830s, but its influence was to persist for over a century, branching into British Idealism and Christian socialism. This was the tradition which William Temple and his contemporaries inherited, and which they had to restate in the light of changed circumstances after 1918.

This chapter argues that the correct internalist account of perceptual experience involves four key claims, that sensory contents are qualia, that experiences of qualia are constituted in a necessary a posteriori manner by internal physical states, that these states have the modal structural architecture pioneered for color experience by Hardin, and that intentionalism is the correct account of the semantic contribution of these experiences. It considers contrary externalist arguments, including arguments rooted in the claim of Williamson and Harman that knowledge is a basic mental state, in Kant's Refutation of Idealism, and in disjunctivism.

Various Europeans scholars, poets, and philosophers who lived during the period between 1790 and 1905 would all agree that, aside from how Sophocles' Antigone was the best of Greek tragedies, this tragedy is the closest to perfection than any other work of art created by the human spirit can get. As Athens during the 5th-century facilitated the emergence of thoughts and discussions about the pre-eminence of man, his genius was recognized in terms of poetic, philosophic, and political matters. Ideas from Romantic movements, German Idealism, and the historiography of Freud and Marx's mythography, and other such concerns were given focus in Athens. This chapter discusses how Sophocles was able to gain superiority over other Greek tragedians in his expressions of ideas regarding Idealist and Romantic concepts.