In recent years a number of scholars have begun to dig deeper into the German Enlightenment – an Enlightenment which, at least outside of Germany, still tends to suffer by comparison to the British and French Enlightenments. The German Enlightenment – ‘a spiritual (geistige) revolution … that deeper thinkers must regard as being just as important’ as the material revolution in France (Reference Heine and FernerHeine 1997/1834: 89) – has always been the most philosophical Enlightenment, in part because the Germans were the first to wrestle with the concept of ‘Enlightenment’, but also – as the present volume clearly documents – because of the rich exchanges and interactions between Kant and a host of other German intellectuals.

Kant and his German Contemporaries is a two-volume work. The first volume, edited by Corey Dyck and Falk Wunderlich (Cambridge University Press, 2017), focused on eighteenth-century thought in the areas of logic, mind, epistemology, science and ethics, whereas the present volume examines eighteenth-century German thought in aesthetics, history, politics and religion. In volume 2, Kant’s contemporaries are divided into three distinct chronological groups: his immediate predecessors, defined as those born before 1724; his peers, defined as those born after 1724 but who did not survive him; and his earliest successors – students and intellectual heirs who survived him. Four philosophers are singled out in the first group: Johann Jakob Moser, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Georg Friedrich Meier. Among Kant’s peers, this volume examines Kant’s exchanges with Moses Mendelssohn, Johann Georg Hamann and Thomas Wizenmann. Finally, the works of the following three successors to Kant are featured: Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Part I of the book (‘Aesthetic Perspectives’) focuses on three predecessors (Baumgarten, Meier, Winckelmann) and one peer (Mendelssohn). In the opening essay by J. Colin McQuillan (‘Baumgarten, Meier, and Kant on Aesthetic Perfection’), the author argues convincingly that Kant’s aesthetics grows out of his critique of Baumgarten and Meier – specifically, their joint conviction that aesthetics should be in the business of ‘guiding sensible cognition to perfection’ (pp. 14, 21). Kant rejects aesthetic perfection, but his own mature aesthetics develops through a critical engagement with this position.

Paul Guyer, in ‘Mendelssohn, Kant, and the Aims of Art’, examines differences and similarities between Mendelssohn’s and Kant’s aesthetics, and in the end finds more of the latter than the former. Although Kant’s aesthetics is more formalistic and assigns a much smaller role for our emotional involvement with art than does Mendelssohn’s, Kant’s rejection of perfectionism (cf. McQuillan’s chapter) results in ‘a core conception of aesthetic experience’ that ‘seems deeply Mendelssohnian’ (p. 47; see also p. 49).

In the third essay (‘Winckelmann’s Greek Ideal and Kant’s Critical Philosophy’), Michael Baur contrasts Winckelmann’s conception of art with Kant’s, arguing for the superiority of the former. Winckelmann, though ‘not a philosopher’, ‘is widely regarded as the inventor of what we now call “art history”’ (p. 50; cf. p. 71). His writings had a strong impact on his contemporaries, and Kant does refer to him briefly in both the Friedländer (V-Anth/Fried, 25: 663–4) and Mrongovius (V-Anth/Mron, 25: 1325, 1330) anthropology lectures as well as in one of the Reflexionen zur Anthropoligie (Refl, 15: 280, no. 640). Although Winckelmann’s reflections on ideal beauty (particularly with regard to the ancient Greeks) are often said to have influenced Kant’s concept of aesthetic autonomy, Baur sees more divergence here than similarity:

In part II (‘Historical Perspectives’) we hear more from Winckelmann (approached now as an anthropologist and ethnologist of the ancient world rather than as an art historian) as well as two of Kant’s successors, Herder and Schiller. In ‘Eighteenth-Century Anthropological and Ethnological Studies of Ancient Greece: Winckelmann, Herder, Caylus, and Kant’, Elisabeth Décultot argues for a stronger Winckelmann–Kant connection than did Baur: ‘Winckelmann’s influence on Kant extended far beyond sole references to beauty and aesthetics. Kant’s views on ancient Greece presented striking similarities with Winckelmann’s views on Greek culture and history’ (p. 89). ‘For Kant, like Winckelmann, the Greeks are “originals”’ (p. 90). As Kant remarks in the Jäsche Logic: ‘Among all peoples, … the Greeks first began to philosophize. For they first attempted to cultivate cognitions of reason, not with images as the guiding thread, but in abstracto, while other peoples always sought to make concepts understandable only through images in concreto’ (cf. Jäsche Logic, 9: 27).

In chapter 5, Lydia L. Moland (‘Conjectural Truths: Kant and Schiller on Educating Humanity’) contrasts Kant’s vision of the education of humanity with Schiller’s, concluding that ‘Schiller rejects Kant’s hope for both political education through war and moral education through a church triumphant. He imagines instead an aesthetic state in which beauty produces harmony in the individual and so in society’ (p. 107). Nigel DeSouza, in ‘Herder’s Theory of Organic Forces and its Kantian Origins’, sketches a Kant–Herder connection that will come as a surprise to many readers by drawing attention to the (pre-Critical) Kantian origins of the conception of force that grounds Herder’s philosophy of history. Although DeSouza acknowledges that the mature Kant regards Herder’s appropriation as ‘a very dogmatic’ metaphysics (cf. his review of Herder’s Ideas, AA, 8: 54), he himself holds that in the end Herder’s position is ‘more satisfying’ (p. 127) than Kant’s.

In part III (‘Political Perspectives’), we hear a bit more from Mendelssohn, as well as Kant’s contemporaries Moser and Fichte. Kristi Sweet, in ‘Kant and Mendelssohn: Enlightenment, History, and the Authority of Reason’, examines Mendelssohn’s and Kant’s diverging perspectives on the authority of reason. She sees both perspectives as responses to Luther’s challenge to the moral authority of the Catholic Church, but Kant’s response, she argues, is more radical: ‘For Kant, reason is practical and absolute; for Mendelssohn, it remains speculative’ (p. 135). Reason’s absolute authority and practical orientation entail that it governs not just our inner lives but the external world as well: ‘For Kant, it is not enough that we act from duty; rather, our duty entails making the world a better place. History is the site for this process of bringing humanity to destiny in enlightenment’ (p. 142; cf. pp. 148–9).

In chapter 8, Ian Hunter (‘Johann Jakob Moser and Immanuel Kant on Public Law and the German Religious Constitution’) contrasts Moser’s and Kant’s very different conceptions of constitutional order. Hunter acknowledges at the beginning of his piece that Moser and Kant never referred to each other and that their approaches to his topic ‘do not speak to each other’ (p. 150). Both of these points might seem to make Moser an odd choice of subject in a volume devoted to ‘German thinkers who variously influenced, challenged, and revised Kant’s philosophy’ (p. 1). But Hunter is presenting Moser as a challenge and preferable alternative to Kant. Kant, as a transcendental philosopher, ‘viewed the constitution solely from the standpoint of someone committed to a single religious truth – that of the “pure religion of reason”’ (pp. 168–9) (reine Vernunftreligion, see Religion, 6: 121); whereas Moser, as a more empirically oriented jurist, endorsed a ‘relativistic constitutional view of religious and philosophical confessions as equally legitimate public law associations teaching rival absolute truths’ (p. 169).

Gabriel Gottlieb, in ‘A Family Quarrel: Fichte’s Deduction of Right and Recognition’, seeks to contextualize Fichte’s deduction of right, situating it in a dispute between Kantian ‘perfectionists’ (Gottlieb Hufeland and Wilhelm Gottlieb Tafinger), ‘pure’ Kantians (Theodor Schmalz) and ‘theoretical’ Kantians (Salomon Maimon and Johann Benjamin Erhard) over the foundations of right. Although Fichte never refers to Hufeland, Tafinger or Schmalz in his discussion of natural right (p. 178), Gottlieb holds that he arrives at his position by rejecting the shared assumption of each of these three groups – namely, that any derivation of the concept of right must appeal to morality. Fichte, in contrast, ‘endorses the independence thesis: the science of right is independent of the science of morality’ (p. 172).

The fourth and final part of the book deals with religious perspectives, and the Kantian contemporaries discussed are Wizenmann, Herder and Hamann. In ‘Rational Faith and the Pantheism Controversy: Kant’s “Orientation Essay” and the Evolution of his Moral Argument’, co-authors Brian A. Chance and Lawrence Pasternack are primarily concerned with tracing the development of Kant’s position on belief in God and the highest good. They argue that Wizenmann’s criticisms of Kant’s position in ‘What does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’ (1786) – particularly as regards Kant’s concepts of a ‘need of reason’ and ‘rational faith’ – spur Kant into improving his position in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). Thus their main aim is ‘to show how the second Critique is able to fill in the Orientation Essay’s lacunae’ (p. 214) – in part through Kant’s responses to Wizenmann’s criticisms.

In chapter 11, Marion Heinz (‘Reason and Immortality: Herder versus Kant’) examines Herder’s rejection of Kant’s doctrine of the postulate of immortality, a rejection which turns, at least in part, on two competing notions of immortality: ‘the idea of the postmortem continuance of the soul alone (in Kant’s case) and the idea of palingenesis or metempsychosis (in Herder’s case)’ (p. 216). But the most powerful part of her essay, in my view, concerns her sympathetic presentation of Herder’s multiple objections to Kant’s idea of a critique of pure reason. Herder’s first and primary objection that reason is ‘a natural capacity and as such – in contrast to works produced by human beings – cannot be meaningfully criticized’ (p. 222). (But why should natural capacities be immune to criticism? At any rate, if future philosophers adhere to this Herderian constraint, their workload will be sharply diminished.)

Finally, in chapter 12 (‘Reason within the Limits of Religion Alone: Hamann’s Onto-Christology’) the editor Daniel O. Dahlstrom concludes the volume by challenging Isaiah Berlin’s influential portrayal of Hamann as ‘the pioneer of anti-rationalism in every sphere’ (Berlin Reference Berlin and Hardy1993: 4). In Dahlstrom’s counterview, Hamann ‘is as much a student of the Enlightenment as its critic’ (p. 239). However, making room for Hamann within the Enlightenment comes with a heavy price, for his conception of reason – despite the historical, empirical and linguistic constraints he places on it, which many contemporary readers admittedly find attractive – is irretrievably tied to religion. Reasoning, for Hamann, seems to always amount to ‘the effort to interpret God’s communication with us’ (p. 254).

As the above summary indicates, the contributions to this volume, in their varied approaches to some of Kant’s German contemporaries, contain a healthy mix of defenders as well as critics of the sage of Königsberg. At the same time, I think nearly every contribution demonstrates that Kant’s philosophy is in fact tied to the perspectives of his German contemporaries in ways that many of us did not know about. Learning more about the context of Kant’s (or any great philosopher’s) work can sometimes lead to the conclusion that one’s intellectual hero is not the blaringly original thinker one first learned about as a student. My own recent work on Johann Bernhard Basedow (1724–90), for instance, has led me to conclude that Kant’s debts to Basedow are enormous and generally unacknowledged – most obviously in his philosophy of education, but also in parts of his philosophy of religion and history.Footnote ¹ But, at least in my own case, this intellectual contextualizing of Kant has not led to a diminished appreciation of his work. For it is often in his exchanges and interactions with other thinkers that his true genius begins to shine. Kant’s German contemporaries forced him to become to a better philosopher.