About the colloquium

The aim of this event is to establish a forum for the presentation and discussion of research on authors, works, and themes related to eighteenth-century German philosophy, fostering a broad understanding of the relations of continuity and discontinuity produced during this period. To this end, we by no means assume that there is such a thing as a single, unified “eighteenth-century German philosophy.” We simply proceed from the idea that, under the auspices of Leibniz’s philosophy (and also in opposition to it), certain shared vocabularies, or at least a convergence of themes, began to take shape among various thinkers. In fact, the diversity of philosophical positions attests to, rather than undermines, Leibniz’s importance as the first in a long line of eighteenth-century thinkers. A celebrated adversary of Clarke and Newton during his lifetime, Leibniz published his Essays on Theodicy in 1710, becoming a primary target of Voltaire and, together with Wolff, of the Pietists. Likewise, the discovery and publication of the New Essays in 1765 in a certain sense renewed Leibniz’s legacy in the eighteenth century, such that this date may be taken as the terminus ad quem of the period to be covered by the present colloquium. Accordingly, we have temporally delimited the scope of the presentations to the period between Leibniz’s production and Kant’s pre-critical writings, after which German philosophy would ostensibly open itself to a new phase. Leibniz was not, from the very beginning of the century, a “master” to be overcome, but rather an occasion for producing and appropriating the legacy of his philosophy.

Moreover, in the period under consideration one observes a distinctive interrelation between political and philosophical problems, which contributed to the entrenchment of philosophy in the fragmented German territories, particularly through universities and institutions such as the academies. The growing use of the German language in place of Latin, the increasingly predominant political influence of Prussia, the ever-present risks of censorship, and the hope for a better and freer world, shrouded in the expectation of a Geist der Gründlichkeit in science and philosophy, became both effects and causes of many theoretical and practical circumstances shaping thought in the German territories. Within this context, a number of figures who escape the grand narratives of the history of philosophy left their mark on the eighteenth century. Beyond Leibniz and Wolff, these include C. Thomasius, J. Lange, I. G. Daries, G. B. Bilfinger, J. C. Gottsched, H. S. Reimarus, M. Knutzen, C. A. Crusius, L. Euler, A. von Haller, F. C. Baumeister, A. Baumgarten, J. G. Sulzer, G. F. Meier, J. H. Lambert, and I. Kant himself, among many others whose inclusion would render the list excessively long. Evidently, this period also includes authors who, though not German, directly engaged with and worked through the German philosophical legacy, including figures such as P. Maupertuis, E. Stone, M. de Châtelet, J. O. La Mettrie, Condillac, Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert. The present proposal seeks to include all of those mentioned above, as well as others not explicitly named here, and hopes to receive paper proposals addressing their work.