Some of Herder's most striking ideas stemmed from his early evaluation of German literary publicity, which to his mind stood in stark contrast to conditions in the sociable world. Such a predicament bespeaks the importance of considering the relationship between printed text and lived sociability in the Enlightenment. By charting the heady twists and turns in his intellectual development from 1765 to 1769, this essay treats the young Herder in what for him became an aesthetically charged field between the two. (...) The public which he came to envision would be manifest to the senses, at least to the extent that it might be by the reader of print, but it also amounted to a surrogate for the more tangibly sensual experience of face-to-face community. (shrink)

Cette contribution esquisse un cadre méthodologique pour l'étude des controverses en histoire de la philosophie. Il se construit autour de quatre composants fondamentaux: textes, contextes, prétextes et circonstances. Nous montrons comment, une fois ces éléments identifiés et systématiquement distingués et distribués, une controverse est localisée et circonscrite. En outre, nous montrons comment, formellement, les controverses sont reliées entre elles par le biais de la migration des textes d'un contexte à un autre. Ensuite, nous prenons pour exemple une controverse clé dans (...) l'histoire de la philosophie politique, la controverse à l'âge classique sur le jus circa sacra, « le droit des affaires sacrées », en nous penchant en particulier sur les travaux de Grotius, de Hobbes et de Spinoza. (shrink)

Among all the isms worthy of examination in any study of eighteenth-century German philosophy, Wolffianism is undoubtedly among the worthiest. Broadly defined as adherence to teachings of Christian...

There is widespread agreement in scholarship that Moses Mendelssohn lacked historical thinking, an opinion accepted even among Mendelssohn experts. This misjudgment is based on a remark in his Jerusalem against Lessing’s Education of Humankind and surely ignores Mendelssohn’s historical work. I will question the misjudgment by a detour: first, I will ask for whom Lessing wrote his Education of Humankind. Then I will turn to the usually celebrated origin of historical thinking in Semler and Herder and question the historicity of (...) their views. It is only in the 3rd section that I will focus directly on Mendelssohn’s historical work and his truly historical understanding of religion, in agreement with Lessing. (shrink)