Table of Contents

Preface Note on Translation List of Abbreviations Part I. Leitmotifs 1. Life and Work 2. Jacobi’s “Spinoza and Antispinoza” 3. Groundless Belief: A Philosophical Provocation 4. Does Spirit have Ésprit? On the Figures of Soul, Spirit, and Reason in Jacobi’s Philosophy 5. Between Spinoza and Kant: Jacobi on Freedom and Persons 6. That, What, or Who? Jacobi and the Discourse on Persons 7. Brother Henriette? Deconstructions of Friendship in Derrida and Jacobi 8. “I am and there are things outside me”. Overcoming the “Consciousness-Paradigm” with Jacobi’s Realism 9. The “Tiresome Thing in Itself.” Kant – Jacobi – Fichte Part II. Critical Relations 10. I-hood and Person: The Fichtean Aporia and the Debate with Jacobi 11. Fichte’s Vocation of Man – A Convincing Response to Jacobi? 12. This Individual and No Other? On the Individuality of the Person in Schelling’s Freedom Essay 13. System and Temporality. Jacobi Contra Hegel and Schelling 14. Third Position of Thought Towards Objectivity: Immediate Knowing 15. Metaphysics or Logic? The Importance of Spinoza in Hegel’s Science of Logic Bibliography Proof of first publication Index

Promotional Information

The first English-language translation of Jacobi’s philosophy of realism, situating it in its intellectual context and drawing out its timely implications for metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.

About the Author

Birgit Sandkaulen is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Research Center for Classical German Philosophy / Hegel-Archive at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Her research focuses especially on Hegel and Jacobi. She is the editor of Jacobi’s Correspondence and co-editor of a new “Digital Jacobi Lexicon” at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig. She has published several books on Jacobi, including Grund und Ursache. Die Vernunftkritik Jacobis (2000).

Reviews

Written in a lively and elegant style, this is the best book on Jacobi I know of. It will quickly become the standard place for English speakers to begin exploring Jacobi's thought; its treatment of his relation to Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling will transform the Anglo-American reception of classical German philosophy.
*Frederick Neuhouser, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University, USA*

Jacobi’s importance for modern German philosophy has long been downplayed in the Anglo-American tradition, and no one is more qualified than Birgit Sandkaulen to remedy this situation. Sandkaulen gives us an insightful, sympathetic discussion of Jacobi’s “practical realism”, thereby establishing not just his influence on figures such as Fichte and Hegel, but his impact on existentialism and post-modernism as well.
*Sally Sedgwick, Professor of Philosophy, Boston University, USA*

Sandkaulen’s unapologetic advocacy of Jacobi’s philosophy sets her book apart from previous monographs on the subject. Readers would be hard-pressed to find a study of Jacobi’s thought that is similarly authoritative, original, and substantively illuminating. Those seeking clarity regarding his central ideas and their significance in the context of classical German philosophy will find it in this book.
*Brady Bowman, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Penn State University, USA*

This is both a first-rate work in the history of philosophy, and the needed remedy for insufficient recognition of Jacobi and his influence on German Idealism. Sandkaulen argues powerfully for the importance of Jacobi’s complex double philosophy, and his grounding of philosophy in the experience of human action.
*Jim Kreines, Professor of Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College, USA*

Birgit Sandkaulen’s collection of essays presents a masterful, engaging, and most welcome introduction to the thought of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, the éminence grise of the age of German Idealism, who, today too often neglected, initiated and shaped many of its key philosophical debates.
*Charles Larmore, W. Duncan MacMillan Family Professor in the Humanities, Brown University, USA*