Christian Thomasius and the German Enlightenment

• Grant number: 16/20649-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: February 01, 2017
• End date: January 31, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Yara Adario Frateschi
• Grantee: Diego Kosbiau Trevisan
• Supervisor: Heiner Friedrich Klemme
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
• Associated to the scholarship: 16/08839-8 - Natural law and Enlightenment in Christian Thomasius' philosophy, BP.PD

Abstract

The postdoctoral research bound to this internship, namely "Natural Law and Enlightenment in Christian Thomasius' Philosophy", aims at investigating the tension between two constituent elements of the political philosophy of German Enlightenment which are presented in an author who is crucial to the period: Christian Thomasius (1655-1728). This tension can be formulated as follow: on the one hand, the claim to an unrestricted obedience to the enlightened sovereign as the normative basis of the secular political authority, and, on the other hand, the appeal to reason and freedom as emancipatory motives in the Enlightenment. This tension is present not only in Thomasius, but also in other authors of the German Enlightenment, such as Wolff and Kant. In the framework of this broader project, the BEPE-research proposal seeks to investigate the significance of Thomasius in early German Enlightenment in the light of three main axes: a) the specificity of German Enlightenment within the European Enlightenment and the role of Thomasius as the pioneer of Enlightenment in Germany; b) the relationship between Enlightenment and theology, more specifically Thomasius' polemical stance towards the Lutheran orthodoxy; and finally c) the importance of jurisprudence as the institutional framework within which the early German Enlightenment has established itself, and also Thomasius' relevance in this scenario and in the tradition of German Enlightenment's jurisprudence.