One of the first philosophers to attempt to grapple with Kant's philosophy was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose development of Kantian metaphysics became a source of inspiration for the Romantics.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, a student of Fichte, continued to develop many of the same ideas and was also assimilated by the Romantics as something of an official philosopher for their movement.
Arthur Schopenhauer, rejecting Hegel and also materialism, called for a return to Kantian transcendentalism, at the same time adopting atheism and determinism, amongst others.
His secular thought became more popular in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, which coincided with the advents of Darwinism, positivism, Marxism and philological analysis of the Bible.
Jeremy Bentham, who created his version of the theory in 1829, and John Stuart Mill who made his in 1861 are considered the founders of utilitarianism, though the basic concept predates either of the two philosophers.
[2] Developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-to-late-19th century, Marxism is a sociopolitical and economic view based on the philosophy of dialectical materialism, which opposes idealism in favour of the materialist viewpoint.
In the 1840s, academic philosophy in Europe, following Hegel, was almost completely divorced from the concerns of individual human life, in favour of pursuing abstract metaphysical systems.
Kierkegaard sought to reintroduce to philosophy, in the spirit of Socrates: subjectivity, commitment, faith, and passion, all of which are a part of the human condition.
Auguste Comte, the self-professed founder of modern sociology, put forward the view that the rigorous ordering of confirmable observations alone ought to constitute the realm of human knowledge.
He had hoped to order the sciences in increasing degrees of complexity from mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and a new discipline called "sociology", which is the study of the "dynamics and statics of society".
Besides incorporating varying portions of the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, many British Idealists also took ideas from earlier thinkers such as Aristotle and Plato.
"Social Darwinism" refers to theories that apply the evolutionary concept of natural selection to human society in fields such as sociology, economics, and politics.