Review, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Works, Volume III

Summary

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Works, Volume 3, Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer, 1816. 568pp. + xxvi

The reviewer is pleased that a new volume of Jacobi's collected works has appeared so soon after the last, and wishes both that noble elder and his readers all the best for the uninterrupted continuation of their publication. This third volume contains four writings which, in the words of the preface, “to a certain extent originated simultaneously and are but divergent parts of a single whole that recapitulates itself differently in each of them.” They are: (1) Jacobi's Letter to Fichte, first published in 1799; (2) an essay which first appeared in Reinhold's Contributions (no. 31, 1801), with the title On Critical Philosophy's Attempt to Bring Reason to Understanding and to Transform Philosophy as Such; (3) On a Prophecy by Lichtenberg, first printed in 1801; and (4) the text On Divine Things and their Revelation, with a foreword written for this new edition. An interesting appendix of twenty-three letters to Johann Müller, Georg Forster, Herder, Kant (among them one from Kant to Jacobi), Privy Councillor Schlosser, J. G. Jacobi, and several unnamed recipients concludes the volume.

[SPINOZA]

One might have wished that in the order of publication of these collected works Jacobi's earlier Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza⁵ had preceded the treatises contained in the present volume, for these Letters respond to an historical interest that is older and prior to the forms of philosophy dealt with by these treatises, namely the metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff, which at the time of the Letters was at its last breath.