Reviews of the Pre-Critical Kant

From Firenze University Press Book: Philosophical Reviews in German Territories (1668–1799)

Marco Sgarbi, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Immanuel Kant is one of the philosophers most studied by historians of philosophy for what his thought represented in terms of a break with the past and for the new paths of investigation that he opened. He is studied so much that when reading Kant’s endless bibliography one often has the impression of finding very little that is original and one feels that everything has already been written about him. However, new approaches to the history of thought allow us to read even an author as famous as Kant in another light, revealing previously little known and little explored aspects. This is the case with the methodology of the history of knowledge, using the very particular epistemic genre that is the review. To state that the reviews of Kant and by Kant have not been studied is certainly wrong: No one can deny the extensive bibliography inspired by Christian Garve’s review of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft or the various polemical reviews published by Kant in the 1980s. However, work on these reviews, despite some valuable studies, has not been systematic and has been confined above all to the sphere of the so-called Rezeptionsgeschichte, certainly a very noble area of investigation, but not exhaustive for reconstructing the meaning that reviews had for the intellectual career of the philosopher from Königsberg. As a man of his time, Kant was profoundly influenced by the culture of reviews, an influence which, however, is rarely acknowledged to exalt, and certainly for good reasons, his philosophical genius. However, there are clues that lead us to suspect that reviews had a notable impact on the construction of Kant’s philosophical thought and that Kant’s ideas took very specific trajectories from the reading and writing of reviews. While the reviews received and written by Kant from 1781 onwards, given the philosopher’s already acquired notoriety, have at least been taken into consideration by scholars, this paper addresses those of the pre-critical period, which involve minor writings, in respect of which, often no real echo is perceived either in the philosophical panorama of the period, or in Kantian intellectual evolution. T hese reviews involve authors who were protagonists of the philosophical debate of those years such as Johann Georg Hamman, Moses Mendelssohn, and Johann Gottfried Herder.1 However, I do not take into consideration the one most studied by scholars,2 namely Johann Schultz’s review of Kant’s dissertation De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis published in the Königsbergische gelehrte und politische Zeitunge in November 1771. This review was initially published anonymously, but its authorship is made certain by all the clues that emerge from Kant’s private correspondence and its impact was immediate as can be seen from the letters to Marcus Herz.3 This review marks a friendship that remained stable almost until Kant’s death, a relationship profoundly marked by reviews of Kantian philosophy that led to significant changes in the second edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. However, this review appears at a moment in the development of Kant’s “critical period” and deserves a separate investigation and for this reason it is not examined here.

DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0573–3.05

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