ABSTRACT
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's younger contemporaries could hardly fail to follow his development with the keenest interest and excitement. Friedrich Schiller was the first to try to reconcile Immanuel Kant and Goethe. He has always been most popular as a dramatist and poet-if possible, even more so than Goethe. He was also a professor of history at the University of Jena, where Johann Gottlieb Fichte was for a while his slightly younger colleague, and his philosophical publications were enormously influential. Schiller responded enthusiastically to the most an-timonastic and anti-Christian elements in Goethe. Although the influence of Kant is writ large in his thought, Schiller was no scholastic. Although the influence of Kant is writ large in his thought, Schiller was no scholastic. He did not deal with aesthetics as one of the accepted branches of philosophy, but wrote about art because it was his life.
