Maggs Bros.

An intellectual autobiography by the publisher and writer Friedrich Nicolai (1733-1811), the writing of which was sparked by Kant’s attack on him in Über die Buchmacherey. Zwey Briefe an Herrn Friedrich Nicolai (‘On Turning Out Books: Two Letters to Mr Friedrich Nicolai’, 1798).

‘Nicolai raises questions regarding the meaning of abstraction and the difference between a circular argument and a regress, and elaborates on his objections to ‘a priori’ arguments. Although frequently missing the key point in the arguments criticized, he did discover contradictions, misleading formulations and simple mistakes in the writings of Kant and his followers. These were then eliminated in later editions of their works but, needless to say, without reference to the fact that it was Nicolai who had first drawn attention to them. The vastness of historical knowledge and the tenacity in scrutinizing arguments and quotations demonstrated by Nicolai over years of intensive, not to say obsessive, philosophical studies are undeniably impressive and admirable, most particularly as, fundamentally, he lacked any formal academic education. In his autobiography Ueber meine gelehrte Bildung (On My Scholarly Education, 1799), he goes to considerable lengths to justify his unusual and difficult ‘cursus philosophiae’’ (Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers).

Adickes, German Kantian Bibliography, 1693.