Philosophers after Kant avoided the word "metaphysics" as a characterization of their philosophies. Fichte preferred to speak of “science of knowledge” (Wissenschaftslehre), Schelling spoke of a philosophy of nature, of a philosophy of identity or of a system of transcendental idealism, and Hegel published books with such titles as Phenomenology of Spirit, The Science of Logic, and The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. 

The usage of the word shows a strange inversion: Kant argued a resolutely anti-metaphysical philosophy, but used the term metaphysics without difficulties. German Idealism elaborated strongly metaphysical philosophies without ever using the title metaphysics. 

Metaphysics thus remained identified with pre-Kantian, or “pre-critical” philosophy. If Kant had destroyed metaphysics, then the new post-Kantian philosophy could not be “metaphysics.” So what should we call it? One of the suggested names was transcendental idealism. Kant had already used it, and post-Kantian idealism radicalized it. For Kant, who still thought it through the Leibnizian tradition, the expression meant that the conditions of possibility of our intuition—space and time—did not belong to the things-in-themselves, but were only forms belonging to our mind, which it used to make sense of phenomena.

What inspired the Idealists was the idea of an original activity of the “transcendental subject,” which had first appeared in the Critique of Pure Reason. But the Idealists claimed Kant’s presentation of it was incomplete because he was still ensnared by traditional “dogmatic” metaphysics for which objects must always enter consciousness from the outside.

Transcendental philosophy was for them a systematic and deductive philosophy founded upon the activity of the knowing and acting subject, which they erected into an “absolute subject” in which all otherness was either to be integrated to itself or overcome. If reality is not yet fully suffused with the I, then so it must become. This is the great imperative of practical philosophy: the world must be made to conform to the requirements of the I. Practical philosophy, in the spirit of the Revolution, hoped to transform reality and the so-called things-in-themselves that seemed to limit the I.

The culmination of metaphysics in German Idealism provoked two resolutely anti-metaphysical reactions. On the one hand, the Young Hegelians and the anti-idealists condemned the abstract metaphysical concepts in the name of concrete existence and aesthetics; and on the other, neo-Kantianism lived on in institutional philosophy and replaced metaphysics with epistemology. This anti-metaphysical movement continued into the twentieth century in two important philosophical schools of thought. First, Husserl’s phenomenology whose “return to the things themselves” and his “Life-world” (Lebenswelt) both connote strong anti-metaphysical leanings; and second, analytic philosophy denounces metaphysical discourse as an abusive use of language and considers itself as a form of therapy.

Timeline of German Idealism

Background

• 1623 Jakob Böhme, The Way to Christ (see: Behmenism)

• 1641 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (see: Modern Rationalism, Cartesianism)

• 1677 Spinoza, Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (see: Spinozism, Philosophy of Spinoza)

• 1686 Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics

• 1687 Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy")

• 1690 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (see: British Empiricism)

• 1710 Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (see: Subjective idealism)

• 1732 Wolff, Elementa matheseos universae (influenced Kant)

• 1748 Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

• 1759 Hamann, Socratic Memorabilia (see: Counter-Enlightenment)

• 1762 Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (see: Age of Enlightenment)

1770s

• 1770 Kant, inaugural dissertation

1780s

• 1781

  • Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (see: Transcendental idealism)

  • Death of Lessing

• 1783 Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

• 1784 Kant, "Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?"

• 1785

  • Jacobi, Letters on the Teachings of Spinoza

    • includes unauthorized publication of Goethe's poem "Prometheus". (see: Pantheism controversy, Sturm und Drang)

  • Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

• 1786 Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy

• 1787

  • Second edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

  • Jacobi, David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism

  • Goethe, Iphigenia in Tauris (see: Weimar Classicism)

• 1788 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

• 1789

  • French Revolution begins

  • Second, expanded edition of Jacobi's Letters on the Teachings of Spinoza

1790s

• 1790

  • Kant, Critique of Judgment

  • Maimon, "Essay on Transcendental Philosophy"

  • Goethe, Metamorphosis of Plants

• 1792

  • Fichte, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation

  • Schulze, Aenesidemus

• 1793 Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone

• 1794 Fichte, Foundations of the Science of Knowledge

• 1795 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man

• 1797

  • Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right

  • Kant, Metaphysics of Morals

  • "The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism" (unsigned and unpublished essay written by Hegel, Schelling, and/or Hölderlin.)

  • Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (see: Naturphilosophie)

• 1798 Schelling, On the World Soul

• 1799

  • Napoleon overthrows the French Directory

  • Jacobi, Letter to Fichte (see: Atheism dispute)

  • Schleiermacher, On Religion (see: German Romanticism, Hermeneutics)

  • Schelling, First Plan of a System of the Philosophy of Nature

1800s

• 1800

  • Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism

  • Fichte, The Vocation of Man

• 1801 Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy

• 1804 Death of Kant

• 1807 Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (see: Absolute idealism)

• 1808 Goethe, Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy

• 1809 Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom

1810s

• 1810 Goethe, Theory of Colours

• 1811 Jacobi, Of Divine Things and Their Revelation (criticized Schelling)

• 1812 Hegel, Science of Logic part one ('The Objective Logic', part 1)

• 1813 Hegel, Science of Logic part two ('The Objective Logic', part 2)

• 1814

  • Death of Fichte

  • Defeat of Napoleon; Bourbon Restoration

• 1815 Schelling, On the Divinities of Samothrace (see: Winged Victory of Samothrace)

• 1816 Hegel, Science of Logic part three ('The Subjective Logic')

• 1817

  • Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

  • Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (discusses Kant, Fichte, Schelling in English)

• 1818 Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

1820s

• 1820 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right

• 1825 Herbart, Psychology as Science

1830s

• 1830 Revolutions of 1830

• 1831 Death of Hegel

• 1832

  • Goethe, Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy

  • Death of Goethe

• 1833 Karl Daub, The Dogmatic Theology of the Present Time (see: Right Hegelians)

• 1834

  • Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (English novel which parodied German idealism)

  • Schelling's first public critique of Hegel is published in an introduction to a work by Victor Cousin[1]

• 1835

  • Strauss, The Life of Jesus (see: Young Hegelians)

  • Heine, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany

  • Hegel's posthumously published Lectures on Aesthetics

• 1837

  • Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality

  • Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History

• 1839 Schopenhauer, On the Freedom of the Will

1840s

• 1841

  • Schelling's Berlin lectures are attended by Søren Kierkegaard, Mikhail Bakunin, Jacob Burckhardt, Alexander von Humboldt, and Friedrich Engels

  • Kierkegaard, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (critiques Fichte, Schlegel, and Hegel)

  • Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

• 1842 Bruno Bauer, Hegel's Teachings on Religion and Art

• 1843

  • Trendelenburg, The Logical Question in Hegel's System

  • Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (unpublished until after Marx's death)

  • Lotze, Logic

• 1844

  • Second expanded edition of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation

  • Marx and Engels, The Holy Family criticized the Young Hegelians

• 1846 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (unpublished until 1932) criticized the Young Hegelians

• 1848 Revolutions of 1848

1850s

• 1851 Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

• 1854 Death of Schelling

1860s

• 1860 Death of Schopenhauer

• 1865

  • Stirling, The Secret of Hegel: Being the Hegelian System in Origin Principle, Form and Matter (see: British idealism)

  • Lange, History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Importance (neo-Kantian work)

1870s

• 1874 Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

1880s

• 1885 Josiah Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (see: Objective idealism)

Later

• 1903 G. E. Moore, "The Refutation of Idealism" (see: Analytic philosophy)

• 1907 Benedetto Croce, What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel

• 1912 Paul Tillich, Mysticism and Guilt-Consciousness in Schelling's Philosophical Development (see: Christian existentialism)

• 1916 Giovanni Gentile, The Theory of Mind as Pure Act (Developed a version of idealism which is amenable to fascism. see: Actual idealism)

• 1917 Franz Rosenzweig "The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism" (first publication of lost 1797 unsigned document)

• 1929 Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics

• 1936 Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise: On the Essence of Human Freedom

• 1945 Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (criticized Hegel's historicism as totalitarian)

• 1947

  • Jean Hyppolite, The Genesis and Structure of the Phenomenology of Spirit

  • Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on Phenomenology of Spirit

• 1948 Lukács, The Young Hegel

• 1955 Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation

• 1963 Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (see: Frankfurt School)

• 1966 P.F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (see: Ordinary language philosophy)

• 1974 Derrida, Glas (see: Deconstruction, Post-structuralism)

• 1975 Charles Taylor, Hegel

• 1992 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man