Maggs Bros.

An extensive and detailed contemporary introduction to Kant.

‘Daniel Jenisch was born im Heiligenbeil, East Prussia on 2 April 1762 and disappeared mysteriously in 1804. There is a controversy about the circumstances of his death: did he commit suicide, did he enter a monastery, or did he begin a new life as a radical printer? Such controversy characterizes his whole life. Although Jenisch has nowadays nearly fallen into oblivion, his stupendous literary productivity and inventive way of thinking turned him into a notorious figure of eighteenth-century philosophy. Beginning in 1780, he studied theology and philosophy at the University of Königsberg. Soon he consorted with the inner circle of Immanuel Kant’s pupils. Moreover he cultivated a cordial friendship with Johann Georg Hamann’s son Hans Michael Hamann … On the recommendation of Kant he travelled to Berlin, where he met Johann Erich Biester who played a prominent role in the Berlin Enlightenment of which Jenisch soon became a part. In 1796, his introduction to Kant’s philosophy was published … Although Jenisch boasted about being one of Kant’s early scholars, he was never a fully convinced Kantian. He remained sceptical about Kant’s attempts at the secularization of moral philosophy. But Jenisch’s main objections concerned formal aspects of Kant’s philosophy, especially his ‘technical, metaphysical, scholastic’ style. Jenisch remained a protagonist of popular philosophy who modelled himself on the new Anglo-Saxon way of reasoning, as typified in Jenisch’s translations of James Harris’s Philological Inquiries (Handbuch der philosophischen Kritik der Literatur, 1789) and George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric (Philosophie der Rhetorik, 1791). Jenisch’s intellectual legacy must therefore be seen in his specific eclecticism and the methodological intertwining of different strands of Enlightenment thought: anthropological studies, historical writing and cognitive interest in moral philosophy and religious questions’ (Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers).

Adickes, German Kantian Bibliography, 1625.