Though little known today, Jean Henri Samuel Formey (1711–1997) was a key figure in the Berlin Enlightenment. Born in a Huguenot colony in Berlin, Formey was educated at the colony’s own Collège français, where he trained to be a pastor. Soon after completing his studies, Formey became acquainted with the Saxon diplomat Ernst Christoph, Graf von Manteuffel, who welcomed him into his learned society devoted to the study of Christian Wolff’s philosophy and gave him access to the court of Friedrich the Great. Formey exchanged his pastoral position for a professorship in rhetoric and then in philosophy at the Collège in 1739, and went on to publish a popularization of Wolff’s philosophy, La belle Wolfienne (modeled on Francesco Algarotti’s Il Newtonianismo per le dame, published serially between 1741 and 1753) and a multi-volume philosophical work based on his reworked sermons, Le philosophe chrétien, published beginning in 1750. However, Formey’s greatest impact was in connection with his role in Friedrich II’s revitalized Berlin Academy – he was a founding member of the class of speculative philosophy in 1744 and became its “perpetual secretary” in 1748. This position gave Formey a platform to engage with some of the leading figures (Voltaire, Diderot, Wolff, and Maupertuis) and debates of his time.

In her engaging and meticulously researched study, Annelie Große outlines Formey’s philosophical views, which are throughout informed by his various commitments as a Huguenot (and so a believing Protestant Christian), a Wolffian, and an Academician. Quite generally, Formey is seen to accept the mutually reinforcing character of reason and revelation, viewing neither as wholly dispensable, which position he stridently defends from the “sceptical” threat posed by theistic thinkers like Bayle. Concerning what can be known by reason, Formey sides decisively, if not dogmatically, with Wolff, as he adopts Wolff’s systematic conception of philosophy and definition as “the science of the possible” (41). Yet, Formey was not uncritical in his reception of Wolff, as Große shows in her discussion of his engagement in a number of then-contentious debates, including the proof of God’s existence, the pre-established harmony, and the question of free will. While Formey often sides with Wolff, his approach is thoroughly animated by his diverse commitments, and he is in any case sensitive to recent challenges to the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy.

Concerning the first issue, Formey came out against the popular physicotheological proofs of God’s existence, defended by the likes of Newton and Boyle, but which he viewed as epistemologically insufficient and so vulnerable to attack by unbelievers. Formey contended instead for a Wolffian proof that demonstrated the necessity of a divine author from the contingency of the order of the world, and which Große shows was consistent with Formey’s general conviction in the indispensability of metaphysics for connecting natural philosophy and theology, a conviction which also distinguished him from his fellow Academicians. Second, and interestingly, in the context of his attempted popularization of Wolff, Formey deliberately revives concerns that the pre-established harmony and Wolff’s doctrine of the thoroughgoing connectedness of things in the world amount to a kind of fatalism, and in so doing, caused something of a panic within his circle of Wolffians. Große shows that Formey’s eventual reconsideration of the alleged fatalistic consequences of this doctrine is due to his reading of a defense by Emer de Vattel, though Formey continued to incline towards the theory of physical influx over the harmony. Third, Formey adopts Leibniz’s and Wolff’s compatibilist account of freedom, rejecting the possibility of a liberty of indifference upheld by a number of his fellow academicians. Große effectively shows how Formey’s views on freedom are rooted in empirical psychological, rather than abstractly metaphysical, considerations, a circumstance which it bears noting aligns his account of freedom more closely with Wolff’s rather than Leibniz’s, as Wolff takes up freedom within his discussion of empirical psychology, well before his treatment of topics like the notion of world and its possibility later in the cosmology.

Overall, Große succeeds in drawing deserved scholarly attention to Formey as a highly distinctive and impactful voice within the Berlin Enlightenment. Moreover, Große shows that Formey is a much more dynamic thinker than might be expected, as she is able to show through reference to a number of unpublished sources how Formey’s views developed through engagement with others, even if his core commitments, shaped early in his intellectual upbringing, remain fairly fixed throughout. The only critical reflections that I might offer concern Große’s frequent emphasis on Formey’s differences from Wolff, such as his endorsement of physical influx, which Große suggests troubles Formey’s straightforward identification as a Wolffian (cf. 281). To my mind, Formey’s points of difference with Wolff are less significant than they might appear, and he is rather to be taken as an example of the intellectual diversity within Wolffianism, a tradition which is often misrepresented as one of rigidly dogmatic discipleship that could brook no division. That Formey, as a Christian philosopher, should be drawn to Wolffianism is also readily understandable and indeed reflective of what many of his religiously minded contemporaries (German, French, and Italian) appreciated of it, namely, that it provided an updated and formidable arsenal of arguments to combat the new forces of materialism, naturalism, and irreligion that were on the march across Europe.

In any case, Große’s excellent study will be indispensable for all scholars of the German Enlightenment and is also to be recommended to historians of early modern philosophy more generally.