Immanuel Kant, universal understanding, and the meaning of Averroism in the German enlightenment

Marco Sgarbi

pp. 255-269

in: Anna Akasoy, Guido Giglioni (eds), Renaissance Averroism and its aftermath, Berlin, Springer, 2013

Abstract

Johann Joachim Lange, in his Caussa Dei et religionis naturalis adversus atheismum (1723), characterised the allegedly overbearing influence that scholastic Aristotelianism exercised upon Italian culture during the Renaissance as an atheistic infection (labes) that had later spread all over Europe, including Germany. In the time between G. W. Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, German philosophers, especially those who moved in the orbit of Christian Wolff's influential school of thought, were undoubtedly attracted to the notion of universal understanding. In many cases, as acknowledged by Johann Gottfried Herder, such a fascination with universality and necessity, regarded as the defining characteristics of the intelligible world, betrayed the influence of a particular strain of Aristotelianism: Averroistic Aristotelianism. This chapter intends to revisit the well-known controversy between Herder and Kant on the meaning of Menschengeschlecht, history and universal understanding, and to contextualise the matter of Kant's Averroism.

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel

Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm

Aristoteles

Herder Johann Gottfried

Wolff Christian