Abstract

German idealism is in part characterized by its attempt to provide a justification for our knowledge of the world in response to David Hume's problem of induction. In looking at three major philosophers of this time period - Kant, Fichte, and Hegel- a pattern emerges among their respective treatments of metaphysical propositions and their methods of grounding metaphysics. Kant's method was to demonstrate the possibility of synthetic a priori propositions so as to divide objects epistemologically according to the possibility of their being known or not. This left human psychology uncomfortably split and so Fichte attempted a revision of Kant's system beginning with the assumption of unity in an immediately certain analytic proposition in order to rectify this. However, this limited the scope of his philosophy to a narrow subjectivism based on an ungrounded presupposition of the subject. Hegel's speculative proposition allowed his dialectics to be absolute and objective. It granted his philosophy the power not only to ground metaphysics, but to explain the entire history of human consciousness. As such, it is the culmination of Kant's response to Hume's attack working out its contradictions.