180137 PS German Empirism (2017W)

The historiography of “pre-Critical” German philosophy – between Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant – has traditionally been dominated by a Kantian understanding and evaluation of philosophical tendencies and schools. An important current of eighteenth-century German thought that has particularly suffered from the Kantian understanding of what is (good) philosophy is empiricism. In this seminar, we will look at some of the British sources of empiricism, and assess their influence in the eighteenth-century German debates over experience, metaphysics, and the human mind. This will help to assess what kind of intervention Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was intended to be, and what impact it had. In this way, the seminar will provide an introduction to an important current of (early-)modern philosophy, and a historical overview of German Enlightenment culture.
Empiricist philosophy arose in the pre-modern period in Britain and France. As allies of the new sciences (Bacon, Newton) philosophers like John Locke and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac sought to provide more secular accounts of human psychology, language, and knowledge. In Germany, more attention to sensuous knowledge was paid under the heading of the new discipline of “aesthetics”, inaugurated by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Furthermore, many philosophers took issue with the scholastic methods of metaphysical definition and demonstration – as alternatives, they turned to the sciences, to “common sense” – even to such “unphilosophical” positions as materialism.

It is from this perspective that we will try to appreciate in this seminar the complexity of Immanuel Kant’s position within the history of eighteenth-century German empiricism. That is, we will both try to understand his famous answer to Hume’s problem, and we will stipulate the exchanges between Kant and empiricists.
The seminar will thus have three parts:
1. Key texts of empiricism
2. German empiricism before the Critique of Pure Reason
3. Kant and his critics
Central themes will be the particular eighteenth-century relation between psychology and metaphysics, knowledge, scientific method, and the assessment of philosophical skepticism. We will read John Locke, David Hume, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Michael Hissmann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johannes Nikolaus Tetens, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Christian Gottlieb Selle, and Carl Christian Erhard Schmid.

This seminar aims to introduce students to a major strand of modern European epistemology. The philosophical goal of this seminar is to present the merits and difficulties of empiricist ideas, and equally to assess the price one pays when accepting Kant’s solution to the problem of induction. A pertinent question will be what this price consists of, and whether we are still willing to pay it.
Furthermore, the aim of this seminar is to present students with a less orthodox picture of the history of German philosophy. Students will be made sensitive to the historiographical problems relating to the labels and the “traditions” of modern empiricism and rationalism. What did it mean to be an empiricist at different moments in time, and who actually was an empiricist?