The seminar offers a critical comparison between two major currents of modernity: English empiricism and German idealism. Empiricism reduces knowledge to impressions, ideas and associations, denies objective validity to concepts such as substance, cause and necessity, and leads to a fragmented view of the world, in which even the subject dissolves into a mere sequence of perceptions.
German idealism presents itself as a reaction and a new beginning. Kant posits the transcendental subject as a condition of possibility for experience; Fichte radicalises this principle, identifying the ego as the original act; Hegel completes the journey, conceiving thought as self-understanding of the Spirit: truth is the concept that, through the mediation of the negative, comes to recognise itself.
The heart of the seminar is the analysis of this passage: idealism is not only a critique of empiricism, but a metaphysical turning point. Reality is no longer only what is given, but what manifests itself in thought. From here emerge decisive questions about the unity of being and knowing, about the nature of experience and about the absolute as the ultimate foundation of reality.