ECLECTICISM AND POPULAR PHILOSOPHY

While it was clear that the direct and indirect influence of both eclecticism and (to a lesser extent) natural jurisprudence was dissipating in German universities by the middle of the eighteenth century, the rapid occlusion of the former and the mutation of the latter under the impact of the Critical Philosophy at the end of the century are still somewhat puzzling features of the history of philosophy. For recent attempts to examine the non-Kantian alternatives that began to put down roots in the 1760s and 1770s have shown that there was still a role for eclecticism to play within the critiques that coalesced around the Leibnizian—Wolffian orthodoxy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of the so-called Popularphilosophen, above all Isaak Iselin (1728–82), Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), Christian Garve (1742–99), Christoph Meiners (1747–1810) and J. G. H. Feder (1740–1821).

As Van der Zande has noted, popular philosophy rested on more than simply a cocktail of Wolffian rationalism, Locke and Scottish common-sense philosophy. Indeed, it had as its goal the large ambition of ‘the ethical-cultural formation of man and citizen’ that was reminiscent in some respects of the educational ambitions of Thomasius. These writers wished to take philosophy outside the university and so widen its ambit to include rhetorical, aesthetic and literary topics.