The false consensus effect is the observation that people tend to overestimate the number of people who share their views. In modern environments we also see growing evidence of greater polarization. For example, according to the Pew Research Center over the past five decades, congressional US Democrat and Republican ideologies have increasingly diverged, with an ever shrinking middle ground. This is appears to also be reflected among US citizens, with a "disappearing center" hastened by growing “anarchist” and “anti-establishment” ideologies. Many have speculated that this polarization is a global phenomenon. The question we pose here is how beliefs and network structure might interact to facilitate both false consensus effects and rising polarization.

Chapter 21 examines Goethe’s relationship to German Idealism. Although the speculative nature of the Idealist method appears alien to Goethe’s own thought, and he himself expressed reservations about it, his poetic and scientific works display a significant degree of sympathy with the concerns that motivated his contemporaries. The chapter highlights the importance of Spinoza in the alignment between Goethe and Idealist thought, before considering in detail the significance of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and above all Schelling, whose philosophy of nature and art is particularly resonant with Goethe’s own.

Chapter 19 examines Goethe’s relationship to philosophy, which throughout his life was one of both interest and guarded distance. It considers the transformations which philosophy as a discipline underwent during his lifetime, details Goethe’s attitudes to intellectual developments in his own time, above all the work of Kant, and devotes particular attention to Spinoza, without whose inspiration Goethe’s work is unthinkable, even if it cannot be reduced to a Spinozist position. The chapter also emphasises the singularity of Goethe’s own thought, which was forever transforming any influences that it received, becoming a source of inspiration and critical reflection for contemporary and succeeding generations of philosophers.

This introduction offers an account of Jacobi’s importance for intellectual history and describes how he positioned himself at the centre of critical debates in a way that would shape the intellectual terrain for coming generations.

Manja Kisner stresses Schopenhauer’s continuity with Fichte and Schelling through Fichte’s concept of the intelligible subject as a nexus of ethical drives that tend toward an ethical world order. Schopenhauer rejected so much of this concept that we often miss the positive influences. Kisner points to the fact that Fichte was discussing agency in terms of drives, and responding to the problem of illicitly positing a causal relationship between the intelligible and empirical registers. Schopenhauer disagrees with Fichte’s idea that the intelligible world is a sort of moral destination, his moral fatalism. Kisner sees WWR as a reply to Fichte on this account. Schelling furthers the development toward Schopenhauer, however, by abandoning moral fatalism, and seeing the possibility of moral as well as immoral action, as contingent (not fatalistic) and rooted in an irrational, amoral ground. Schopenhauer can be seen as continuing and radicalizing it. He accepted Schelling’s notion of an amoral ground of being, but viewed it as an occasion for a negative rather than a positive morality. Freedom comes not from grounding oneself in the will and acting rationally, but from resisting the will altogether. Still, this theoretical move presupposes the philosophical tools developed by Schopenhauer’s contemporaries.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

The intellectual excitement of nineteenth-century Germany was reflected by the Romantic and Existential movements, although both had international aspects as well. Both movements were to some extent reactions against the dominant idealism of rationalism, coming primarily from Kant’s views on the active mind, constructing reality. Fichte, von Schelling, and Hegel explored the implication of Kant’s philosophy, with Hegel coming to dominate the age. Romanticism found its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and exerted tremendous influence in art, literature as well as philosophy, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Recognizing the complexities of human experience, particularly in the dimensions of emotions, passions and desires, romanticism explored those aspects not readily explained by rational, intellectual processes. Existentialism was a direct reaction against rationalism and found initial expression in the nineteenth century by Kierkegaard, in Theology, and Dilthey, in psychology. Further, the Kantian notions of the strivings of the will and the unconscious were explored more fully by Schopenhauer and von Hartmann.

The opening chapter looks at the role of judgement in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on the way in which the legislative function of the understanding is central to transcendental idealism. It shows how Kant associates determination with judgement, and how this association is maintained in Hölderlin and Schelling’s efforts to resolve certain aporias in the Kantian system, with being understood as indeterminate because it differs from the world of judgement. It concludes by showing how Hegel resolves difficulties presented by Hölderlin’s distinction between judgement and being by seeing judgement as an abstraction from a richer process of reason. As such, it demonstrates the centrality of judgement in the German Idealist tradition.

In his “General Overview of the Most Recent Philosophical Literature” (1797), Schelling considers Reinhold’s claim that the will must be separate from practical reason in light of Kant’s treatment of the distinction between the will and the power of choice. By divorcing the will from reason, Reinhold supposedly cannot account for our obligation under the moral law. Schelling observes that the discrepancy between Kant’s claim that the will is neither free nor unfree and Reinhold’s assertion that the will is free only insofar as it has the capacity to be good or evil is rooted in the nature of the will itself. Kant’s and Reinhold’s variance is, as it were, the result of a partial perspective of an issue properly conceived of only through a unified standpoint. Kant considers the will insofar as it is not an object of consciousness, Reinhold insofar as it occurs in consciousness. For Schelling, these seemingly disparate perspectives are integrated in the recognition that the power of choice is the appearance of an absolute will and, as such, indicates the action through which what is intellectual becomes empirical, the absolute becomes an object, and the infinite becomes finite.

Remembering is also the theme of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) but of a different kind than Schelling’s. It is not of a cosmic event; nor does it yield a theogony. The issue for Hegel is rather the actualization of the historical human individual and of humanity accordingly, and the remembering is of how being rational affects an individual’s relation to nature. At origin this relation is worked out unconsciously. It is visibly reflected, however, in the sense of self-identity into which an individual is historically born, just as one is born into a family. To retrieve the source of the identity, thus to make it deliberately one’s own – by the same token to make of nature a work of intelligence – is the factor that motivates experience. Chapter 5 contrasts Schelling’s and Hegel’s respective ideas of history. It then proceeds with a detailed examination of the Phenomenology up to the section on Religion. It argues that, while in some ways a work of conceptual fiction, the Phenomenology must nonetheless have historical anchoring and logical significance. It also underscores the debt Hegel owes to Fichte that makes him quite different from Schelling.

Prior to 1800, Schelling had tried to overcome Kant’s alleged formalism with a theory of nature which presented the latter as a process of progressively more complex forms of inanimate and organic existence. The process culminated in the reflectively intelligent life which made idealism possible. As Schelling contended regarding Fichte, in his Science the latter had abstracted only this last moment of the process, and this was a claim that Fichte could not accept. By 1800, Fichte was thus defending his Science of the “I” on two fronts – against Kant who in 1799 had singled it out as being empty logic and against Schelling who was in effect making the same claim. Chapter 2 is dedicated to an account of these events and the exposition of the texts associated with them. What transpires from Fichte’s response to Kant, and his controversy with Schelling, is that there was a disconnect between all involved because of an ambiguity inherent to the monism, and the intuitionism the latter required, which all concerned accepted (Kant only hypothetically, by default). The ambiguity was an encumbrance from classical metaphysics that still affected the new Idealism. It was Spinoza’s challenge.

Religion is for Hegel the language of a community about itself. Its practices and beliefs reflect the sense of self-identity that animates the community’s members, and, since that identity is a product of reason, they also reflect the level of explicit rationality the community has achieved. Religion, however, is not the same as rational knowledge. Evil, for Hegel, is not a cosmic event as it is for Schelling but a historical and eminently individual act – in effect, the product of reason doing violence to nature. Religion’s specific function is thus one of reconciliation, a function that assumes different forms depending on historical circumstances and the advent of self-aware rationality. Nonetheless, reconciling cannot be the same as understanding reconciliation. Chapter 6 contrasts religion in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. It returns to the theme of feeling of Chapter 1, for feeling is an experience of identity. It also examines Hegel’s interpretation of the Christian story of incarnation and redemption as an imaginative portrayal of incarnate rationality. It then again returns to Chapter 1 by interpreting Hegel’s Logic, the science of this rationality, as an extension of Kant’s doctrine of the categories but without the classical metaphysical presuppositions still encumbering that latter.

Also Schelling – by 1802 a declared Spinozist – altered his methodology, adding to it a phenomenological dimension. In 1807 he portrayed the philosopher as an artist singularly gifted with an intuitive sense for nature as issuing from the Oneness of the Absolute, equally substance and subject. Jacobi attacked him for this. Chapter 4 details Schelling’s ensuing controversy with him but is otherwise dedicated to Schelling’s seminal Freedom Essay (1809). In the essay Schelling again portrayed the philosopher as a divinely inspired artist. He now conceived his work, however, as one of remembering the event at which God manifests himself in the form of a world that reflects in its manifold the internal economy of the divine being. This event is shrouded in the human unconscious but can be brought to light through the philosopher’s imaginative representations. The warrant for these is that they resonate with humankind’s belief, embodied in mythology, that its history is also the history of God’s realization in space/time. Schelling was thus adopting a rich metaphysical position, the direct contrary of Fichte’s ontological quietism, which the monism the two shared nonetheless also made possible. Evil comes up as an important issue for Schelling

This chapter examines the nature and the origins of what it identifies as a distinctively Romantic view of music. According to this, the purpose of music is to provide non-linguistic knowledge or insight, most usually into one’s inner self or, especially, into the fundamental nature of reality. The chapter starts by charting some key moments in the philosophical background of the 1780s and ’90s. Building on this, it traces the emergence of the Romantic view of music in the works of the two philosophers most closely involved in its earliest formulations: Friedrich Schlegel and Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg (better known by his pen name Novalis). It concludes with brief examinations of the ways in which this view was elaborated by two now-canonical philosophers of this era, Friedrich Schelling and Arthur Schopenhauer, and with a reflection on the subsequent influence of this view.

Mahler’s private philosophical interests and ambitions, and, in particular, his determination to use music to address the problem of mortality, are less the result of hubris than a symptom of the thinking at the foundation of his worldview. Mahler came of age as a thinker in the late nineteenth century, a time of great intellectual upheaval and contesting philosophies regarding the world and humanity’s place within it. The epistemological and ontological debates of this era saw idealism and materialism, empiricism and rationalism, as well as many other strands of thinking propagated in the search for a fundamental understanding of life. This chapter considers the place of idealism within contemporaneous intellectual history, defining it and encapsulating the thought of its more important figures, particularly Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The impact of this philosophy on German-speaking culture was profound, as it pervaded the Romantic movement, in which Mahler’s own aesthetics was ultimately rooted.