Books
Forthcoming
Series: Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 149 ISBN-10: 90 04 15607 0 ISBN-13 (i) The ISBN (International Standard Book Number) will change from 10 to 13 digits on 1 January 2007 : 978 9004156 07 4 Cover: Hardback List price: € 129.00 / US$ 168.00
Table of contents Vorwort
Readership All those intersted in intellectual history, the history of the enlightenment, history of philosophy and theology and Church history.
About the author(s) Ulrich L. Lehner , Th.D. (University of Regensburg, 2005), is Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at Marquette University. He has published extensively on intellectual and ecclesiastical history, including a new commented edition of Martin Knutzen’s “Beweis von der Wahrheit der christlichen Religion” (2006).
It is widely agreed that protestant scholasticism influenced Kant’s thinking on the question of Divine Providence. But the nature and extent of that influence have never been explored in detail. This is the scholarly lacuna the present volume seeks to fill. It shows how Kant, from his pre-Critical period onward, grappled with the concept of Divine Providence, sought to subjectivize and naturalize it, and how protestant scholasticism played an important role, both positive and negative, in this endeavor. It also makes clear how this critical philosophical conversation gave rise to a powerful notion of the progress of the human species – a vital part of the Enlightenment’s enduring legacy. This study thus provides not only a unique theological-philosophical overview of 18th-century speculation on the question of Divine Providence; it also sheds important new light on the significance of the German Enlightenment.
