MACKENSEN (Wilhelm).
Grundzüge zu einer Theorie des Abstractionsvermögens.
"A protest against the post-Kantian conceptual philosophy"
The rare final work by the German philosopher Wilhelm Friedrich August Mackensen (1768-1798), published posthumously in the year following his premature death at the age of thirty. ‘A protest against the post-Kantian conceptual philosophy and its trifling with and rummaging among concepts and deductions which have no real objective significance. Mackensen himself has recourse to the ‘faculty of abstraction’. But he understands by the expression something quite different from what it ordinarily means in logic - not, i.e., the capacity to rise from the individual to the general … but the capacity to abstract entirely from words and symbols, to think without words and to pierce through to the things themselves … [The book’s] real value lies in the fact that it contains a caution, especially needed at the time, against mere word-play … What the work demands, and what it finds praiseworthy in Kant, is not any particular tenet of the Kantian philosophy, but rather the first requisite of any true philosophy whatsoever’ (Adickes 2301).
