Jeff Samuelson’s Reviews > German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 > Status Update

Absolute idealists explain the possibility of knowledge with the principle of subject-object identity. A rejection of all forms of dualism. Only a single infinite substance which subject and object are attributes. There then can be an interchange between understanding and sensibility (the intellectual and empirical).

Fichte: we have knowledge as a result of action, not contemplation. Practical reason is the root of all reason. The faculty of desire/ will is the first principle of philosophy

Kant making the crucial distinction between understand sensibility. Sensibility and perception is not an unclear sense of something noumena, but a clear perception of the phenomenal. Therefore space is intuitive and not of understanding/conceptual. The representation of space is singular. This as opposed to Leibniz who holds that space is general. A concept rather than intuition.

Beiser writing is so clear, great book so far