The Concept of Drive in Classical German Philosophy

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. Introduction

   • Manja Kisner, Jörg Noller

   Pages 1-9

3. The Theory of Drive: The Dual Legacy of Leibniz’s Theory of Appetition

   • Catherine Wilson

   Pages 11-37

4. Between Reimarus and Kant: Blumenbach’s Concept of Trieb

   • John H. Zammito

   Pages 39-60

5. Stoic Dispositional Innatism and Herder’s Concept of Force

   • Nigel DeSouza

   Pages 61-82

6. The Economy of the Bildungstrieb in Goethe’s Comparative Anatomy

   • Andrew Cooper

   Pages 83-105

7. “Wie die Triebe, so der Sinn; und wie der Sinn, so die Triebe”: Jacobi on Reason as a Form of Life

   • George di Giovanni

   Pages 107-126

8. Kant on Driving Forces: Parallels and Differences in Kant’s Conceptualization of Trieb and Triebfeder

   • Manja Kisner

   Pages 127-148

9. The Drive to Society in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment

   • Dietmar Heidemann

   Pages 149-168

10. Feeling and Life in Kant’s Account of the Beautiful and the Sublime

    • Yoon H. Choi, Alix Cohen

    Pages 169-189

11. Equine Driving: Plato, Kant and Fichte on the Teamwork of the Mind

    • Günter Zöller

    Pages 191-211

12. “The Drive to Be an I Is at the Same Time the Drive to Think and to Feel”: Hardenberg/Novalis on Drives, Faculties, and Powers

    • Violetta L. Waibel

    Pages 213-239

13. Drive, Will, and Reason: Reinhold and Schiller on Realizing Freedom after Kant

    • Jörg Noller

    Pages 241-254

14. Drives in Schelling: Drives as Cognitive Faculties

    • Paul Ziche

    Pages 255-279

15. The Trieb of Dialectic: Systematic and Thematic Extension of the Concept of Trieb in Hegel

    • Angelica Nuzzo

    Pages 281-297

16. Trieb and Triebe in Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Nature

    • Marco Segala

    Pages 299-322

17. Back Matter

    Pages 323-332

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This volume gathers a collection of fourteen original articles discussing the concept of drive in classical German philosophy. Its aim is to offer a comprehensive historical overview of the concept of drive at the turn of the 19^th century and to discuss it both historically and systematically. From the 18^th century onward, the concept of drive started to play an important role in emerging disciplines such as biology, anthropology, and psychology. In these fields, the concept of drive was used to describe the inner forces of organic nature, or, more particularly, human urges and desires. But it was in the period of classical German philosophy that this concept developed into an important philosophical concept crucial to Kant’s and post-Kantian idealistic systems. Reflecting the complexity of this concept, the volume first discusses historical sources of drive theories in Leibniz, Reimarus, and Blumenbach. Afterwards, the volume presents the philosophical accounts of drives in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and also gives a systematic overview of other important drive theories that were formed around 1800 by Herder, Goethe, Jacobi, Novalis, Reinhold, Schiller, and Schopenhauer.

• Drive
• Life
• Life science
• Freedom
• Nature
• Aesthetics

• University of Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany

  Manja Kisner

• University of Munich, Munich, Germany

  Jörg Noller

Manja Kisner is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Wuppertal. She completed her PhD and postdoc studies at the University of Munich. She has written articles and book chapters on Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. Her books include Der Wille und das Ding an sich (2016) and The Concept of Will in Classical German Philosophy (with J. Noller, 2020).

Jörg Noller is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Munich. He is the author of a number of books, editions and articles on freedom from a historical and systematic perspective, including Die Bestimmung des Willens (2016) and Kant’s Early Critics on Freedom of the Will (with J. Walsh, 2021). His research interests include metaphysics, freedom, personhood, and German Idealism.

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