ABSTRACT
Immanuel Kant's 1791 Critique of Judgment inspired the best of nineteenth-century European philosophy, including German Idealism and Romanticism and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The philosophies of both G. W. F. Hegel and Nietzsche have been the target of sustained and intensive feminist critique for decades, in what Paul Patton calls "a battlefield of conflicting interpretations". Feminist philosophers have extensively analyzed all of Hegel's central concepts, including both their limitations and their further possibilities for development in directions not anticipated by their author but consonant with his philosophical system. Truth is a veil that both promises and hides something that seems to lie underneath appearances, but the feminine is that which recognizes both the temptation and the deceptiveness of such an appeal. Although women's intellectual contributions were increasingly heard in nineteenth-century German culture, the venue for women to express them was primarily restricted to letters, journals, and the conversations of literary salons.
