The neo-Kantian Reception of Schiller

In the second half of the nineteenth century several representatives of the then-rising neo-Kantian movement began to take an interest in Schiller’s work. Schiller was already regarded as a great writer, nonetheless, his reappraisal as a philosopher – and, more specifically, Kantian philosopher – began in this period. Among the neo-Kantians who dealt with Schiller’s philosophy there are paramount figures of this trend, such as Kuno Fischer, Friedrich Albert Lange, Wilhelm Windelband, Jonas Cohn, Rudolf Eucken, Hans Vaihinger, Bruno Bauch, Karl Vorländer and Ernst Cassirer. Schiller’s philosophy is characterized by a peculiar mixture of Kantian and Platonic elements (the latter acquired indirectly by Schiller, through his reading of Shaftesbury and Romantic thinkers). Consequently, there are two paradigmatic readings of Schiller’s philosophy: the Kantian one emphasizes his adoption of the critical framework of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, thus stressing the juxtaposition of the sensible and the ideal world; whereas the Platonic one emphasizes the role of beauty as harmonic unification of the two worlds, thus revealing the metaphysical commitments of Schiller’s philosophy. The aim of the project is to reconstruct the Schiller’s reception by the neo-Kantian movement, while highlighting how they addressed the two sides of Schiller’s philosophy, the Kantian and platonic ones.