Abstract
As Professor Kuehn tells us, the conventional wisdom is that the best in eighteenth-century German philosophy was anti-skeptical, simpliciter. In fact, however, recent work has shown that it was no such thing. The chapters in this section reinforce the view that skepticism was a much more widespread and pervasive view in eighteenth-century Germany, and much more subtle and nuanced, than the conventional wisdom permits Each chapter, in its way, contributes to the project of tracing the multiple forms and influences of skepticism in this period.
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References
Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). See Achim Engstler, Untersuchungen zum Idealismus Salomon Maimons (Stuttgart, 1990); Sylvain Zac, Salomon Maimon: Critique de Kant (Paris, 1988 ).
See Between Kant and Hegel,ed. and tr. George di Giovanni and Henry S. Harris (Albany, 1985) and Michael Forster, Hegel and Skepticism (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
Ezequiel de Olaso, “Leibniz and Skepticism,” Skepticism from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Richard H. Popkin and Charles Schmidt (Wiesbaden, 1987 ), 133–67.
Olaso points out (p. 148) that the recent English edition of Leibniz’ New Essays on Human Understanding by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge, UK, 1981) fails to note that at p. 491 Leibniz originally labelled the argument ad vertiginem as the argument ad scepticismus. In addition to the failure of most readers to look at the many manuscripts and letters cited by Olaso in which Leibniz expresses concern with skepticism, omission of such details in widely-used texts makes it easier to conclude that Leibniz never paid any attention to skepticism.
José Luis Bermudez, “Skepticism and the Justification of Transcendental Idealism,” Ratio, 8 (new series), (1995), 1–23.
Odo Marquard, Skeptische Methode im Blick auf Kant (Freiburg, 1958; rpt. 1982). See also his many studies since then, some of which have been translated into English.
Giorgio Tonelli, “Kant und die antiken Skeptiker,” Studien zu Kants philosophischer Entwicklung, ed. Heinz Heimsoeth et al. (Hildesheim, 1967), 93–123. I have translated this article for Skepticism in the Enlightenment, ed. Richard Popkin, Giorgio Tonelli, and Ezequiel de Olaso (Dordrecht, 1997). I should record my view here that Tonelli underplays Kant’s debt to and affinities with skepticism, especially in the last sections of his article. Nevertheless, it is a gold-mine of sources and connections to the skeptical tradition. I have contributed to the literature on skepticism in Germany in this period with “Swiss Anti-Skeptics in Berlin,” Die Schweizer in Berlin, ed. Helmut Holzhey and Martin Fontius (Berlin, 1996 ).
Ludwig Weber, Das Distinktionsverfahren im mittelalterlichen Denken und Kants skeptische Methode (Meisenheim am Glan, 1976); Christoph Wild, Philosophische Skepsis (Königstein/Taunus, 1980); Manfred Kuehn, “Kant’s Transcendental Deduction: A Limited Defense of Hume,” New Essays on Kant, ed. Bernard Den Ouden (New York, 1987), 47–72; John Christian Laursen, “Kant in the History of Skepticism,” John Locke und Immanuel Kant: Historische Rezeption und gegenwärtiger Relevanz, ed. Martyn P. Thompson (Berlin, 1991), 254–68; John Christian Laursen, The Politics of Skepticism (Leiden, 1992), 193–212; Richard H. Popkin, “Skepticism and Optimism in the Late 18th Century,” Aufklärung und Skepsis, ed. Lothar Kreimendahl et. al. ( Stuttgart, 1995 ), 173–84.
Bermûdez, “Skepticism and the Justification,” 18.
This is recognized in works such as Barry Stroud’s The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism (Oxford, 1984). Stroud sets out to provide “a treatment of skepticism” (xiv), but along the way he establishes that Kant was in large part a skeptic (ch. 4) and that no one has a good answer to the skeptics.
This insensitivity to irony is also found in Donald W. Livingston’s Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life ( Chicago, 1984 ). Livingston concludes that Hume is genuinely religious, which I find incompatible with his writings as a whole.
Odo Marquard, Farewell to Matters of Principle (Oxford, 1989), 111.
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Laursen, J.C. (1998). Commentary: Skepticism in Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy. In: van der Zande, J., Popkin, R.H. (eds) The Skeptical Tradition Around 1800. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol 155. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3465-3_9
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