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This book sheds new light on the fascinating – at times dark and at times hopeful – reception of classical Yoga philosophies in Germany during the nineteenth century. When debates over God, religion, and morality were at a boiling point in Europe, Sanskrit translations of classical Indian thought became available for the first time. Almost overnight India became the centre of a major controversy concerning the origins of western religious and intellectual culture. Working forward from this controversy, this book examines how early translations of works such as the Bhagavad Gītā and the Yoga Sūtras were caught in the crossfire of another debate concerning the rise of pantheism, as a doctrine that identifies God and nature. It shows how these theological concerns shaped the image of Indian thought in the work of Schlegel, Gunderrode, Humboldt, Hegel, Schelling, and others, lasting into the nineteenth century and beyond. Furthermore, this book explores how worries about the perceived nihilism of Yoga were addressed by key voices in the early twentieth century Indian Renaissance – notably Dasgupta, Radhakrishnan, and Bhattacharyya – who defended sophisticated counterreadings of their intellectual heritage during the colonial era. Written for non-specialists, Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany will be of interest to students and scholars working on nineteenth-century philosophy, Indian philosophy, comparative philosophy, Hindu studies, intellectual history, and religious history.

Kant's arguments for the reality of human freedom and the normativity of the moral law continue to inspire work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this ground-breaking study, Owen Ware defends the controversial view that Kant's mature writings on ethics share a unified commitment to the primacy of the moral law.

Owen Ware here develops and defends a novel interpretation of Fichte's moral philosophy as an ethics of wholeness. While virtually forgotten for most of the 20th century, Fichte's 'System of Ethics' (1798) is now recognised by scholars as a masterpiece in the history of post-Kantian philosophy, as well as a key text for understanding the work of later German idealist thinkers. This text provides a careful examination of the intellectual context in which Fichte's moral philosophy evolved, and of the specific arguments he offers in response to Kant and his immediate successors. A distinctive feature of this study is a focus on the foundational concepts of Fichte's ethics - freedom, morality, feeling, conscience, community - and their connection to his innovative but largely misunderstood theory of drives.