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“God … has sent me to Germany”: S alomon M aimon, F riedrich J acobi, and the S pinoza Q uarrel
Author(s) -
Rosenstock Bruce
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
the southern journal of philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.281
H-Index - 21
eISSN - 2041-6962
pISSN - 0038-4283
DOI - 10.1111/sjp.12077
Subject(s) - faith , philosophy , context (archaeology) , theology , epistemology , history , archaeology
S alomon M aimon's Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie [Essay in Transcendental Philosophy] (1790) challenges and reworks K ant's arguments in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason] (1785, 2nd ed. 1787) about the foundations of natural science and of N ewtonian physics in particular. K ant himself was impressed both with M aimon's grasp of his critical project and also with the force of his challenge to it. While Maimon's significance on the later development of German Idealism is now widely acknowledged, another aspect of M aimon's Versuch has not been fully appreciated, namely, its engagement with the central questions of the Spinozastreit [ S pinoza Quarrel] that erupted in 1785 with the publication of F riedrich H einrich J acobi's Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn [Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn]. The S pinoza Quarrel centered on whether and to what extent philosophy's rational understanding of G od needs to be grounded in an unmediated and suprarational revelatory experience. This paper is the first extended effort at placing M aimon's Versuch into the context of the S pinoza Quarrel. I argue that the S pinoza Quarrel and M aimon's self‐proclaimed philosophical mission in response to it—the replacement of revealed faith by reason—deeply inform the goals he pursues in his Versuch . I show how M aimon's Versuch can be read as not only a response to K ant, but also to Jacobi's defense of the revelatory nature of sense experience in D avid H ume über den Glauben (1787), the book in which J acobi offers his own skeptical challenge to K ant's Kritik . Situating M aimon's Versuch as a response to F riedrich J acobi's D avid H ume allows us to understand how one of M aimon's objectives in his Versuch is to keep J acobian Glaube [faith] at bay by demonstrating, using a revised K antian framework, the conditions of the impossibility of experiencing miracles.