The British Wave: The Impact of British Views of Human Nature, Morality, and Religion on 18th-Century German Philosophy

Aim of the project is to investigate on a larger scale how far British views and conceptual vocabulary contributed to shaping German philosophical debates in the eighteenth century. Instead of focusing on the alleged sources of one individual German philosopher’s views, the proposed research intends to reconstruct the impact of a wider network of concepts, philosophical views, and controversies from Britain on the German discussion. The main underlying assumption of the project is that German eighteenth-century philosophical debates cannot be fully appraised without taking the impact of contemporary British views into account. Assessing the proper impact of British views on the Germans thus requires a broader perspective. By adopting a different methodology than most previous investigations, the proposed research intends to overcome the stalemate that characterizes current scholarship, where the broad significance of British views for the development of eighteenth-century German philosophy is widely acknowledged but has nevertheless not been investigated on a larger scale. The project shall thus (a) consider not individual writers, but a larger discussion, (b) focus on specific issues and the relevant conceptual framework, (c) examine a wider range of sources. The proposed research will single out two interrelated areas of cardinal significance for eighteenth-century German philosophy, in which the British impact was decisive, yet only superficially assessed so far: (1) Human nature, obligation, and virtue, (2) Deism, natural religion, and rational theology. The first line of inquiry shall examine the impact of British views on German philosophy with regard to epistemological, psychological and normative issues in moral philosophy. We shall analyse unexplored appropriations of British sentimentalist views by writers such as J.G. Feder, J.Ph. Merian and E. Platner, or their rejection, also with regard to the debate on the notion of sympathy and moral obligation. The second line of inquiry will focus on the German reception of key texts of the British deistic tradition, starting from the works of Herbert of Cherbury and Locke, to show that, far from being confined to discussions among a few ‘radical’ writers, deistic ideas went through a variety of philosophical and theological debates of the German Enlightenment. With its two lines of inquiry, the project intends to show through investigations on two exemplary areas what the exploration of eighteenth-century German philosophy can gain by adopting a wider, contextual outlook. The research on German Enlightenment philosophy shall thus be more closely connected to the scholarship on eighteenth-century British philosophy, history of ethics and history of theology, thereby opening new perspectives for a more in-depth understanding of those discussions.