Projektnummer

0058984

Zusammenfassung

This project argues that the waning of the Enlightenment in Germany was accompanied by an attempt to merge the Republic of Letters with the nascent, bourgeois public sphere in order to create a culture of learned public debate. According to its advocates, this phenomenon, termed Streitkultur, carried with it the potential to accelerate the process of popular enlightenment. The project examines pivotal public disputes such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Fragmentenstreit, the pantheism controversy between Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and the battle over Immanuel Kant's...