ABSTRACT
Idealism is a philosophy that has been out of fashion for more than a century-so far out of fashion and seeming so far off the table of defensible philosophical positions that many philosophers would probably be hard pressed to say anything much about it, even in criticism. Oddly enough, idealism has even tended to remain out of fashion despite a revival of interest in particular idealists, like the considerable revival of interest in both Kant, a “transcendental idealist”, and the “German idealists”, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, who worked in his wake. Here, among those sympathetic to those philosophers, it is not uncommon to encounter denials that they were “idealists”, even in the case of Hegel, who referred to his philosophy as “absolute idealism”. The general idea seems to be that one must separate a philosopher that one wants to defend from the “i-word”, given the simply irredeemable nature of idealism as a philosophical stance.1
