Research
Project Description
Aim of the project is to investigate on a larger scale how far British views and conceptual vocabulary contributed to shaping German philosophical debates in the eighteenth century. Instead of focusing on the alleged sources of one individual German philosopher’s views, the proposed research intends to reconstruct the impact of a wider network of concepts, philosophical views, and controversies from Britain on the German discussion. The main underlying assumption of the project is that German eighteenth-century philosophical debates cannot be fully appraised without taking the impact of contemporary British views into account. Assessing the proper impact of British views on the Germans thus requires a broader perspective. By adopting a different methodology than most previous investigations, the proposed research intends to overcome the stalemate that characterizes current scholarship, where the broad significance of British views for the development of eighteenth-century German philosophy is widely acknowledged but has nevertheless not been investigated on a larger scale. The project shall thus:
- consider not individual writers, but a larger discussion,
- focus on specific issues and the relevant conceptual framework,
- examine a wider range of sources.
The proposed research shall examine the impact of British views on German philosophy with regard to epistemological, psychological and normative issues in moral philosophy. We shall analyse unexplored appropriations of British sentimentalist views by writers such as J.G. Feder, J.Ph. Merian and E. Platner, or their rejection, also with regard to the debate on the notion of sympathy and moral obligation.
With this line of inquiry, the project intends to show through investigations on two exemplary areas what the exploration of eighteenth-century German philosophy can gain by adopting a wider, contextual outlook. The research on German Enlightenment philosophy shall thus be more closely connected to the scholarship on eighteenth-century British philosophy, history of ethics and history of theology, thereby opening new perspectives for a more in-depth understanding of those discussions.