AGATE

The task of the project is the development of a historico-critical edition and annotation of letters by and to the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743 - 1819). Genuine and fictitious letters characterised Jacobi's work. A epistolary novel (Allwill), a novel with interspersed letters (Woldemar), epistles and about 2800 recorded letters testify to the meaning he gave to this literary form of intellectual exchange. His criticism of the systematically structured philosophy (opposing Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling) based on the realization that a complete coping with reality in this thinking leads to nihilism (Jacobi 1799) and atheism. Reality can only exist in immediacy and is to be perceived in faith. Jacobi fights against rationalism with it's own means and in this way he prepares the ground for romantic and existentialist thinking.