[KANT (Immanuel).] &
STÄUDLIN (Carl Friedrich).
Geschichte des Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus vornehmlich in Beziehung auf das Christenthum. Nebst einigen ungedruckten Briefen von Kant.
CONTAINING THE FIRST PRINTING OF THREE LETTERS FROM KANT
[KANT (Immanuel).] &
STÄUDLIN (Carl Friedrich).
Geschichte des Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus vornehmlich in Beziehung auf das Christenthum. Nebst einigen ungedruckten Briefen von Kant.
The Protestant theologian Carl Friedrich Stäudlin (1761-1826) was the dedicatee of Kant’s 1798 book Der Streit Der Fakultäten (‘The Conflict of the Faculites’). The present book includes the first appearance in print of three of Kant’s letters to Stäudlin dated 4 May 1793, 4 December 1794, and 1 July 1798. The May 1793 letter is particularly well-known for first outlining Kant’s critical distinction between philosophy and anthropology.
‘Stäudlin wrote the first substantial history of philosophical scepticism, and the first good history of moral philosophy. Educated at the Protestant Stift at Tübingen in the years 1779–84, he travelled in Germany, Switzerland, France and England in the years 1786–90, and was named professor of theology in Göttingen in 1790. In 1801, Hegel characterized Stäudlin’s work as superficial, perhaps because he stole Hegel’s thunder about scepticism; and Stäudlin certainly did not see the history of philosophy in terms of the grand dialectic that Hegel saw. Nineteenth-century historians of philosophy such as De Gérando cited Stäudlin along with Bayle, Huet, Plouquet, Arrhénius, Kindervater, Langheinrich and Beausobre as a major secondary source on scepticism’ (Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers).
Adickes, German Kantian Bibliography, 119.
