Ursula Goldenbaum

Urban Gottfried Bucher is one of the most surprising authors in early German enlightenment and has been rightly celebrated as a materialist and therefore radical thinker. But he did not teach the same kind of materialism as his contemporary Andreas Rüdiger who leaned toward Locke’s empiricism. Bucher is much closer to Hobbes’ mechanical materialism, to Spinoza’s criticism of free will, and to Tschirnhaus’ extending of the mathematical method to natural science. His explanation of the working of the human soul, while materialistic, is rationalistic and mechanical. The difference between the two kinds of materialism becomes crystal-clear in Bucher’s and Rüdiger’s approach to the Copernican system they both embrace. For Rüdiger, the Copernican hypothesis is seen as a probable truth we can hold on to as long as we don’t obtain competing empirical sensiones and ideas, even if our globe should not really move around the sun. For Bucher though, it is a demonstrated truth that gains additional support by a machin...

Nach einer umfangreichen theoretischen Einführung wird auf der Grundlage von sieben Fallstudien die Funktion der öffentlichen Debatte für die Entstehung bürgerlicher Öffentlichkeit und Aufklärung im protestantischen Raum des Alten Reiches analysiert. Die Untersuchung bietet zugleich einen methodischen Zugriff zur Erforschung der Geschichte von Ideen, der sowohl den Vereinseitigungen der traditionellen Ideengeschichte als auch der sozial- und mentalitätsgeschichtlichen Forschung entgehen will. Im untersuchten Korpus jeder Debatte sind die Texte großer Schriftsteller ebenso enthalten wie die Arbeiten weniger bekannter Autoren. Es handelt sich um Texte von Aufklärern und von Repräsentanten kirchlicher und staatlicher Macht, die innerhalb der Debatte aufeinander verweisen und zugleich die sozio-kulturellen Bedingungen reflektieren, aus denen heraus die Debatten entstanden sind. Jeder der Studien ist eine Chronologie und eine Bibliographie beigegeben, zudem steht dem Benutzer ein Gesamt-Namenverzeichnis zur Verfügung.

Larry Jorgensen aims to show that "Leibniz offers a fully natural theory of mind", recommending Leibniz to our contemporary discussion of naturalism. Readers of Leibniz will, however, hesitate to call him a naturalist. After all, he considered natural laws to be subordinated rules below general divine laws and rejected explaining the soul's action by bodily motion. Jorgensen does have a point, though, when he refers to Leibniz's frequent pleas for natural explanations and his continuity principle.Jorgensen's project unfolds in four parts. The first offers a discussion of Leibniz's concept of nature and a clear presentation of Leibniz's principles, above all the...

There is widespread agreement in scholarship that Moses Mendelssohn lacked historical thinking, an opinion accepted even among Mendelssohn experts. This misjudgment is based on a remark in his Jerusalem against Lessing’s Education of Humankind and surely ignores Mendelssohn’s historical work. I will question the misjudgment by a detour: first, I will ask for whom Lessing wrote his Education of Humankind. Then I will turn to the usually celebrated origin of historical thinking in Semler and Herder and question the historicity of their views. It is only in the 3rd section that I will focus directly on Mendelssohn’s historical work and his truly historical understanding of religion, in agreement with Lessing.

The many equivocations that, in several respects, characterised the reception of Leibniz's Principes de la Nature et de la Grâce and Monadologie, up until the last century, find their origins in the genetic circumstances of their manuscripts, which gave rise to misinformation published in an anonymous review that appeared in the Leipzig Acta eruditorum in 1721. Archival research demonstrates that the author of this review, as well as of the Latin review of the Monadologie, which appeared, the same year, in the Supplementa of the Acta eruditorum, was Christian Wolff, who possessed a copy of the Leibnizian manuscrip since at least 1717. This translation figured as a precise cultural strategy that aimed to defuse any idealist interpretation of Leibniz’s monadology. An essential part of this strategy consists in reading the theory of pre-established harmony as a doctrine founded on a strictly dualistic substance metaphysics.

This paper intends to show the connection between the theological, logical and epistemological ideas in Leibniz’s thinking. The paper will focus on the reasons for Leibniz’s fundamental decision to defend the Christian mysteries and his three different strategies for doing so. Each of these strategies is an answer to a particular challenge: to the Socinian who claims that the mysteries are contradictory; to the mechanical philosophy which denies the possibility of the mysteries, and to Spinoza’s parrot argument which demands that we be silent when we have no comprehension. Although he had already worked out his reconciliation of the Christian mysteries with the mechanical philosophy in Mainz around 1670, Leibniz first published it only in 1710 in his Théodicée