Christoph August Heumann’s Acta philosophorum and the Rise of the History of Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment

Roberto Bordoli

Abstract: Heumann distinguishes historia philosophica (written by historians) from historia philosophiae, written by philosophers and conceived as a new philosophical discipline like the soon-to-appear philosophy of history and esthetics, all modern disciplines formulated in the Age of Enlightenment. History of philosophy expresses judgments on philosophies of the past and compares philosophies and traditions, considering what is useful, true and virtuous in them for the present. Philosophers need philosophical history of philosophy in order to produce better philosophy more attuned to their own time. Heumann deals with method and ends of history of philosophy, with philosophical historiography and highlights the independence of philosophical thought from theology, religion and myth. Though somewhat ambiguously, he sees philosophy as a discipline also suited to women and wrote a first history of female philosophers. It was not by chance that this appeared in a periodical that ran for about fifteen years for a total of around 3000 pages; the new discipline was immediately seeking and found its readership.

Keywords: History of Philosophy, Aufklärung, Christoph August Heumann, Modern Philosophy.

1. The belief that prior to Hegel no one thought that in order to study philosophy it was indispensable to know its history implies that philosophy sees itself as consisting exclusively in the search for truth and virtue and in reasoning rigorously about both. From this perspective philosophy—philosophia perennis?—cannot be distinguished from the formal and natural sciences and follows the classical canon of logic, physics and ethics. As with mathematics, it has no need for its own history in order to achieve its aims. Only from Hegel on is there the conviction that philosophy is concomitant with its own history or, at least, one cannot know it without referring to its history. Moreover, these two theses are quite different.

In 1715, Christoph August Heumann (1681–1764) wrote in the philosophical journal he founded and edited that it was his intention to promote knowledge of what is true and what is good, opposing false beliefs through an “eclectic” search for truth.1 It will be seen more clearly below that “eclectic” means personal, free, functional to the truth and emancipated from pre-established authorities, schools, and systems. Heumann’s goal was to discuss directly and clearly—not in weighty Latin tomes—the history of philosophy and at the same time of philosophers.2

In his view, the true philosopher is the one who looks for the truth alone and tries to ground it on certainties. The interpres philosophi (he mentions Epictetus), the epigone, is a member of a sect that garners the ideas of a philosopher in the past and illustrates them to the young (Acta philosophorum I 1715, 194). A philosopher is a man of reason whereas the epigone is someone who obeys the rabbis, fathers of the church, auctoritates, and tradition. The epigones of Aristotle are the Scholastic philosophers, those of Plato the Church Fathers. The philosopher considers other philosophers as his equals and to the extent to which he finds their ideas valid and firmly based, he accepts them. If not, he rejects them. An epigone, in contrast, sees the philosopher by whom he is inspired as a despot and does not assume the right to accept or reject his ideas but, rather, merely to succumb to them passively and divulge them tirelessly. The moral comparison between the proud thinker and the paltry repeater mirrors that between a free government backed by independent citizens, sui juris, and a despotism imposed on compliant citizens as well as, in the age of nascent public opinion, that between a free debating of different opinions and fanatical propaganda.

One is not born but becomes a philosopher. To do so, you have to apply and develop the love for truth. Epigones, on the other hand, are born as such since they are what they are by being part of a school, for example the Platonic or Cartesian school (Acta philosophorum I 1715, 195). The philosopher is someone who uses their independent judgment; the epigone is a “homo beatae memoriae” who takes pleasure in reproducing the ideas of others, for the most part from the past. It is said that a philosopher examines ideas. An epigone, instead, prefers to err with his mentor than to be in the right by embracing a different opinion that is more convincing, better grounded and argued. This is why no eclectic sect exists (as Jacob Thomasius would wish), which is a contradictio in adiecto—like saying free slavery (Acta philosophorum I 1715, 197). Eclecticism is a critical method, not a particular philosophy.

Philosophy is practiced by free men and it develops and is nourished in free ethical-political communities without needing to refer to an authority, the past or tradition. The free citizen of the pòlis and the Protestant citizen in modern European states are two models, one ancient and the other modern, for a community where philosophy can thrive best. Exceptions such as Socrates, exemplum of knowledge and virtue condemned by his fellow citizens, confirms the rule. This is what the author of the first review of philosophy and history of philosophy thought.

2. So it is that the belief seems well founded that a century before Hegel no one thought the history of philosophy was useful for philosophers, a view confirmed by one of the first exponents of the history of philosophy. In addition, in the XVII century before Heumann there were many historians, but no philosopher, who wrote on the history of philosophy (Bordoli 2022, 31–46). Examples are Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638) who studied its chronology and taxonomy (Alstedius 1650, 453–55; 471–85; Alstedius 1612; Alstedius 1620); Thomas Stanley (1625–1678) with his celebrated Historia philosophica (Stanleius 1655–1660 3 vols; 1711, 2 vols), Georg Hornius author of Historia philosophica (Hornius 1622), Gerard Vossius, author of a critical review of the ancient philosophical schools (Vossius 1658); and Joannes Jonsius (1624–1659), professor of philosophy at Königsberg whose 1659 work on philosophers (Jonsius 1659) was integrated and republished in 1716 (Jonsius 1716) with a preface by Burkhard Gotthelf Struve (1671–1738). There were also some theologians who took an interest in the history of philosophy in relation to questions concerning the “history of truth” and its revelation to mankind, for example, Roman Catholic Pierre-Daniel Huet (Huetius 1694) and Lutheran Jacob Thomasius (Thomasius 1665; Thomasius 1699). Nevertheless, philosophers were apparently not at all interested in the history of philosophy. The expression historia philosophica was used to refer to a branch of history, like ecclesiastical, military or universal history, of interest to professional historians or, at most, theologians for rhetorical-literary purposes. Ancient examples such as Aristotle’s first book Metaphysics or Diogenes Laertius’ Philosophers Lives and more recent works concerned with philosophia perennis fall outside this field either because they belong to doxography (so within the first case) or they are manifestly speculative thinking.

Corroboration e contrario for this belief could also even be sought in the so-called critical thinkers, such as Pierre Bayle, Richard Simon or Jean Le Clerc and many others, who were not systematic philosophers but able to exert a strong and lasting influence on philosophy and the history of ideas. Neither can we overlook Humanism and the European Reformation, sometimes intertwined and at others separately, but with a big influence in providing tools for critical thinking. Suffice it to consider Biblical Criticism in the XVII century. In Halle in the XVIII century, two figures such as Johann Jacob Baumgarten and Johann Salomo Semler, promotors of Nachrichten von einer Hallischen Bibliothek, show the deep-reaching effects of the interaction between these traditions.

3. The conclusions from these brief considerations may appear to be paradoxical. In 1715 Heumann, who thought that philosophy was the search for what is true and what is good, held that this could be done by studying the history of philosophy within the field of philosophy and not history, without an opposition arising between the use of philosophical thought in its three divisions of logic, physics and ethics and the history of philosophy conceived as a growing and innovative dimension of philosophy itself. He was aware of this new aspect to the extent of founding the first review of philosophy, which was also the first review of the history of philosophy. The language changed too. If the history of philosophy points to a new philosophical field and no longer solely an area of history, it must not be confused with the expression historia philosophica then in use. Aiming to extend philosophical thought and not place philosophy and history in opposition—or worse philosophy and the history of philosophy—this mental shift was marked by the review’s demanding title, Acta philosophorum, das ist Gründl. Nachrichten aus der Historia philosophica, nebst beygefügten Urtheilen von deren dahin gehörigen alten und neuen Büchern.

The history of thought is accomplished through the use of thought; it makes no sense to place them in opposition to one another. The facts and documents of history have to be accompanied by rigorous (logical and historical) judgment on truth and virtue. The first step is for facts and documents to be gathered and examined by the adminicula of humanist tradition: criticism (critica) and philology. Here we are in the realm of professional historians: if and to the extent necessary these tools are to be used to define the object, materia subjecta.

However, concomitant with this phase is another more strictly philosophical one, that of judgment, of discerning what is true and what is false in a reasoning or theory in relation to other reasonings or other past or current theories. This judgment, then, also deals with the ethical and political impact of philosophical ideas and systems.

According to Heumann in 1715, this is where the usefulness of philosophy of history lies, which encompasses the overall benefit of freeing men from ignorance and in particular ignorance as concerns philosophy, still seen as the source of ideas that, if examined with rigor, turn out to be no more than fairy tales (Acta philosophorum I 1715, 3 ff.). But philosophy of history also has particular additional benefits, for example that deriving from the eclectic approach.3 As seen above, the eclectic position is not a specific philosophy but, rather, a method for choosing true and effective reasonings and theories. The philosophus eclecticus is the one who is able to choose what is best. The same happens in religion. Those who never put foot outside Italy or Spain would continue to view Lutherans as heretics (Acta philosophorum I 1715, 21); and the same that holds in spatial terms also applies to time. The history of philosophy teaches us to understand that what appeared or appear to be paradoxes should be taken as such even if they go against the apparent defenses of common sense.4 Philosophy as criticism and “correction of appearances” (Hume) is a guideline modern reason and the Aufklärung and is associated with biblical criticism. This is how the words of Paul of Tarsus are sometimes interpreted in the modern age: “omnia autem probate, quod bonum est tenete” [prove all things, hold fast that which is good].5 We learn from the history of philosophy written by philosophers that an apparently new idea is often not such and we are able to because many sources are studied and compared. This underlines how desirable it is that, before historians, it is philosophers themselves who should deal with the history of philosophy (Acta philosophorum I 1715, 34). Conversely, up until that time this was done by historians and philologists.

4. As we have seen, in order to grasp the importance of including the historical dimension in philosophy, typical of the modern age, it is necessary according to Heumann to distinguish historia philosophiae from historia philosophica. The first entails the search for the truth of facts and theories6 and therefore requires philosophers to express their judgment, which is something the professional historian could not do. Judging what is true or what is of value is alien to the history of historians. It was an epochal sea change.

This recalls the words of Jean Le Clerc in a review of the work of Edward Hyde (1609–1674), 1st Earl of Clarendon (Hyde 1706–1707). The erudite professor at the Remonstrants Seminarium in Amsterdam and son-in-law of Gregorio Letti, commending the way the former Chancellor of the Exchequer writes about history, says:

Ceux qui croyent que l’Histoire est une simple relation de ce qui s’est passé, dont l’Historien laisse le jugement au Lecteur, ne goûteront pas la méthode de celle-ci; où l’Auteur fait souvent d’assez longues leçons aux Rois et aux Peuples de la Grande-Brétagne […] Il me semble que ce là [est] le veritable usage de l’Histoire, et que l’Historien doit aider ses Lecteurs à le faire (Bibliothèque choisi XVIII 1709, 14).

Moreover, the growth from within the nova philosophia of historical awareness together with a critical approach was based on the emergence of a free subject in an open society. That is why this process unfolded in the modern age. Two preconditions were necessary: the Greek idea of philosophy and the Protestant Reformation. Heumann made full use of these two antecedents, thereby contributing to provide the rudiments also for a second modern philosophical discipline, namely philosophy of history. While the history of philosophy helps the philosopher to choose what is true and what is good, the philosophy of history legitimizes the modern age as that in which mankind has reached a better and more advanced state because characterized by the development of modern freedom, which is what enables progress in knowing the truth and acting morally for good. These are guaranteed by the universalization of the ancient freedom of the Athenian citizen and the freedom of conscience of the modern Christian.

Morality came into being with Socrates. Scientific knowledge existed in the East, but it was something other than the studium philosophicum that is the study of physics. Attributed to the ancient Hebrews and the patriarchs, also sapientia [Weisheit]7 is something other than philosophy. What is called Barbarian philosophy (Heurnius 1600) is in reality not philosophy. It is only with the Greeks that institutional religion—publicly organized and professed—became separated from the search for truth. We see only with the Greeks the true beginning of philosophy, at first particulariter, occasionally and individually, and then systematice and universaliter, in schools and academies, institutions for its promotion and cultivation. The Christians inherited philosophy from the Greeks and found it easy to use since their religion and their revelation are (or should be) pure and rational.8

The term Weltweißheit/Weltweisheit9 is the result of a preconception since it derives from identifying philosophy with human and secular knowledge in opposition to religious and theological knowledge or faith. It cannot be true wisdom but, as said in 1Cor 1, 20,10 only stupidity and presumption if it expected to go beyond its own boundaries, those of finite knowledge. This idea recurs in some fathers of the church such as Tertullian, who talks of sapientia saecularis or Lactantius, who mentions the terrena philosophia, or Augustine, so beloved by the papists (but also Luther!), who acknowledges a hujus mundi philosophia. Hence it is preferable in German to use the term Philosophie as the alternative is too technical and tied to logic. This is also the case in the other modern European languages like Italian and French.11 So it is that for Heumann the Greek origin of philosophy is transposed both—with regard to people in the East—into its definition as abstract reality able to think the universal but also—in respect of Christianity—as rationality that covers the entire field of the concept, not confining itself to empirical experience. Comparing the history of Christian ideas with the history of philosophical ideas shows that reason is applied to every aspect of natural and human life provided that authority and superstition, violence and ignorance are curtailed and neutralized.

The learned and orthodox work of Jacob Thomasius12 presents a different, though sophisticated, approach to the new times:

Non placent mihi novationes. Sed nec disciplicuit [sic] unquam Antiquitatis notitia. Quam ita mihi servo, ut ad ingenium seculi me componam interim in iis, quae et ferri possunt absque noxa capitali, et mutari non possunt absque convulsione literarii status. (Thomasius 1699, 21).

The history of philosophy (and of theological-religious ideas) is, however, also reputed to be useful both for accommodating moderate degrees of innovation and for rejecting that which would instead overturn what exists. And this implies that the age is the harbinger of big changes but also that history of philosophy is acknowledged as a new dimension of philosophical thought.

Lastly, Heumann remarks that history of philosophy has to be seen as the history of all the philosophical disciplines in their entirety and not merely as the sum of the history of logic, the history of metaphysics etc. Also, it has to be viewed from both a chronological and geographical perspective (Acta philosophorum I 1715, 462 ff.). This method is universal and enables understanding that it is a philosophical and not a historical discipline. In this regard, an explicit analogy with ecclesiastical history is made,13 to which we will come back below.

Heumann stops at this point, not going so far as to see history of philosophy and philosophy as identical and deny that logic, physics and ethics are fundamental parts of philosophy.14 Truth and what is ethical-politically good are two objects that philosophy seeks and in which it consists. History of philosophy and philosophy of history are two new and intertwined realms in this search—along with many other realms.

5. From the long methodological Einleitung, subdivided into ten Capitel distributed in the first four Stücken of Acta philosophorum15 emerges a notion not only of history of philosophy but also of nova philosophia, the new culture. This claim is directly substantiated by three examples, which would find full expression in Hegel’s history of philosophy, interwoven with the development of the modern world and the philosophy of history. They are ethical-political freedom, whose ideal model are the Greeks; the anthropological importance of the Lutheran Reformation for the interiorization of conscience; and modern thought and its immanentistic and systematic nature.

Heumann provides the example of a division of the history of philosophy into Greek philosophy and modern philosophy, which is not easy to find in the XVIII century except for first Buddeus and only later Hegel (Bordoli 2022, 80). This is connected with the emphasis placed by Heumann and shared by Hegel on the relation between the exercise of ethical-political freedom and the development of philosophy. Furthermore, Heumann points to the profundity of the relation between freedom and philosophy by, like Hegel, conferring due importance to the interiority of conscience and consequent divesting of the divine character of external nature and of the State. Liberty, secularization and immanence recur in numerous articles, above all in those dedicated to Bruno, Galilei and Spinoza and those to Luther and Melanchthon.

In one of the latter there is a reference to Johannes Grunius (1587, 64), in which Heumann underlines a particularly important assertion in the light of other less acceptable views on the history of philosophy: “Et quia lux Verbi divini sine philosophia excitari non potest” (Grunius 1587, 64); Luther did well to enlist Melanchthon’s support. Within the same perspective lies the reappraisal of Paul of Tarsus, who in the Aufklärung would become leader of a tendency in Christianity marked by practical faith and the depth of conscience, freed from manifest observance of ceremonies and superstition.

The seven Capitel on Bruno (totaling around 160 pages) look at a difficult writer acknowledged to be a model of atheism and include him fully in modern philosophy.16 Three contributions are on the accusation of atheism made against Bruno da Veyssière de La Croze.17 At the philosophical level, Heumann focuses on the thesis of the infinity of worlds and of the universe, which he considers to be shared also by Descartes, adding that it is not a question of a demonstrated truth but of a probable hypothesis based on the infinity of God.

Also of interest is the mention of the Spinozist Hendrik Wyermars (1684–1757)—and other Spinozists like Willem Deurhoff, about whom Heumann shows he is well informed—18as it links up with the relation between religion, theology and philosophy, referring to the writings of Gottfried Arnold. The latter had opened up a new path in ecclesiastical historiography interpreted as history of religious and philosophical ideas,19 and this is the model that Heumann employs to formulate the basic principles of history of philosophy. Just as religious ideas have followed the most varied paths in becoming established (not only those of the orthodoxies), so philosophical ideas follow erratic routes before being acknowledged as true. Thus, like heresies that are fully part of ecclesiastical history and should not be treated differently from orthodox ideas, atheism is also a fully-fledged component of the history of philosophy and assists in better judging ideae and opiniones receptae.

So it is that Heumann reads Wyermars not out of curiosity or scholarship, a desire to shock, or even to share in Spinozism, but because it lies within the innovative intention to put together a history of philosophy that narrates the growth of and interweaving between conflicting ideas in human history. It is interesting that in 1750 also Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten’s Nachrichten von einer Hallischen Bibliothek20 talks at length of Spinoza and the Spinozists; the aim changes, but works of this kind continue to be read and studied with increasing meticulousness. Wyermars 171021 argues for the eternity of the world and refutes the creatio ex nihilo of Genesis. He was locked up in an Amsterdam prison for fifteen years. In 2015 a modern annotated edition of the work came out but has not yet been translated (Wyermars 2015). Heumann was the first to write on the work.

The definition of a new philosophical discipline, on the one hand, and modern subjectivity able to make a better use of thought on the other set the preconditions for a further and innovative contribution from Heumann in the review: the history of philosophy written by women.22 The fifty pages contain a short introduction (first seven paragraphs) followed by a review of thirty or so female philosophers, considered as such and not as in the past simply learned or intellectual thinkers. Referring to Jonsius (1659, I, chap. 3, 22), Heumann goes as far as to maintain that the first trace of a philosophy of history was female and down to Theano from Crotone, wife, daughter or mother of Pythagoras (Acta philosophorum I 1715, 178). The criteria for excluding or including names are not very clear (Graneß and Herzl in Heumann 2023, 28 and passim). Nonetheless, it has to be noted that the start of history of philosophy includes specific attention to women philosophers on the basis of the principle that philosophy can be practiced by anyone, a principle that could not be taken for granted in that age.

6. Acta philosophorum is an important publication also in terms of quantity.23 The observations made so far are based for the most part on the Einleitung zur Historia philosophica, which takes up the first three Capitel (pp. 1–103) in the I Buch (Book); the first four Capitel (pp. 179–314) in the II Buch; Capitel I (pp. 381–462) and Capitel II in the III Buch (pp. 462–72)24; and last, Capitel I in the IV Buch (pp. 567–670). Altogether numbering around 432 pages, it is an ample essay that welcomes the emergence of the new philosophical discipline in the first philosophical review.

The work is made up of three books (Bücher) containing 18 pieces (Stücken):

I, 1–6, 1715–1716.II, 7–12, 1716–1721.III, 13–18, 1723–1726.

All the Bücher were published in Halle by Renger in 1716, 1721, 1726. Each Stück is of about 180 pages for a total of over 3000, at an average of 1000 per Buch. All three Books have an analytical index of authors.

In the Einleitung the main issues are addressed that were to be debated throughout the entire XVIII century in the process that would lead to the definition of history of philosophy as an independent field of study, and which would be given a systematic exposition in Hegel’s manuscripts of the Einleitungen to his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie (above all in those of 1820 and 1825–1826).25 The themes expounded on in the ten chapters of the Einleitung zur Historia philosophica are:

I, I, I – Utility of history of philosophy.I, I, II – Sophus, philosophus, sophista.I, I, III – Essence and concept of philosophy.I, II, I – Characteristics of false philosophy.I, II, II – Kabbalah (follows on from preceding).I, II, III – Origin and development of philosophy.I, II, IV – Weltweisheit (follows on from I, I, II).I, III, I – De fide historica, or credibility of history of philosophy.I, III, II – Dividing up history of philosophy.26I, IV, I – Ingenium philosophicum.

Acta philosophorum contains 144 contributions of short and long Capitel at an overall average of about 21 pages in-8 per Capitel. The distribution among the three Books is fairly balanced with the number increasing from one Book to the next. There are themes dealt with in several articles. Each Book has short Capitel (up to 8–10 pages), often dedicated to historiographical and bibliographical overviews. Monographic Capitel are normally found at the beginning. Excluded are reviews in the evaluative sense, which were a literary genre and characterized instead periodicals like Acta eruditorum or Nachrichten von einer Hallischen Bibliothek. This confirms the innovative nature of Heumann’s work. The necessarily experimental character of his initiative accounts for the variety of themes and styles in the different Capitel.

The 144 articles (Capitel) range from antiquity to the modern age, including the Orient (Near and Far East), as was then common: a term that also included the Holy Scriptures (Jewish and Christian) and Patristic and Kabbalistic traditions. Nonetheless, Greek and modern philosophy prevail; eastern and medieval philosophy appear to a very modest degree. Among the ancients Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Stoics and Stoicism are recurrent and among the moderns Pomponazzi, Bruno, Descartes, Spinoza, Burnet, but also Luther and Melanchthon (two Capitel on the religion/philosophy theme in the Grunius volume). Particular attention is reserved for the new science with Galilei (in as many as five Capitel), Huygens, and Harvey. Heumann deals especially with philosophical historiography or what could be considered such, as in the works of Jonsius. Rare or little known works are often mentioned. Sometimes a Capitel has an anecdotic nature, for example on the physical appearance of Socrates and on Xanthippe.

7. In Heumann history of philosophy does not correspond with philosophy but the first takes from the second an interest in the search for what is true and what is good. This is a criterion that is shared throughout the XVII century, in which history of philosophy developed as a philosophical discipline, at times contiguous with philosophy of history. A decisive contribution was made by reviews, which stimulated in readers new interests and curiosity and interpreted intellectual changes with greater flexibility and courage than other media and institutions.

Even the first Kantian historians of philosophy showed that including history of philosophy within philosophy as its modern side does not mean to make philosophy and history of philosophy identical (whatever that may mean) despite that giving rise to many problems. A follower of Kant like Johann Christian August Grohmann (1769–1847) holds that history of philosophy was a new field of study, complementary to the philosophy of history, that modern man has to engage with and which expresses a kind of autobiography of modern times at the level of ideas. The origin of history of philosophy is the concept, not experience.27 Science is a system of necessity according to the concept and so is history, including history of philosophy. The history of philosophy does not take its method from pragmatic history concerned solely with external circumstances. The development, progress, that Grohmann detects and praises is conceptual in nature. The variations that history of philosophy deals with are the various philosophical systems. It examines how the thought of mankind passed from the dogmatic approach at its origins to idealism and from idealism to criticism, culminating in Wissenschaftslehre (the echo of Fichte is no coincidence) with which philosophy reaches its greatest degree of speculation (Grohmann 1798, 42).

Carried away by his logic into a paradox, Grohmann starts from philosophy of history and precisely from the infancy of mankind as outlined by Kant in Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht [1784].28 Can one conceive an a priori history of philosophy, just as it is possible to formulate an a priori universal history? Like Kant reflecting on the conditions that make a philosophy of history possible for mankind, an examination is made of what conditions make a history of philosophy possible, putting in parentheses the mass of opinions and ideas that make up the pragmatic side. It is evident that this leads the author to place in the foreground the question of method: that of philosophy and that of history of philosophy (Grohmann 1798, 8). The ethical and logical comparison between philosophy of history and history of philosophy also opens a work on the same theme that Grohmann had published the year before (Grohmann 1797, 2–3).

Only method and not system can lay down the path that leads empirical content to unity of form or idea or concept (Grohmann 1797, 6–25). There is no system for that which implies references to content deriving from experience. But there is method. This goes for natural history as for universal or pragmatic history where single events (facts), besides being considered as such, are traced to something universal and thus treated with method.

Grohmann ponders whether that is also the case with history of philosophy. It presents an empirical side (history) and a conceptual side (philosophy) (Grohmann 1797, 25–6). Contrary to those who start from the first, he begins from the second in order to find an a priori that enables time and space to be accounted for (Grohmann 1797, 30). This implies that history of philosophy does not consist in a sequence of facts (opinions) in time, but rather in various systems, that is various (universal and necessary) conceptual orders connected logically to one another (Grohmann 1797, 32). These systems are grounded in a necessary and unitary mode on the diverse faculties of the human spirit, which represents the a priori, that is the condition of being possible (Grohmann 1797, 34).

The system (the necessary connection of the concepts) is, of course, in a close (causal, logical) relation with its sources—the different conceptual references set in time and space, the organization of which gives rise to the system (Grohmann 1797, 38 ff.). Consequently, an a priori history of philosophy appears as the representation of possible systems.29 For an opposite conception, Grohmann cites an article in a periodical edited by Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, professor at Jena (shortly to be joined by Fichte), in which a pragmatic and thus empiricist interpretation of the notion of history of philosophy is given (Niethammer 1795).

The objects of universal history are empirical and cannot be traced back to general laws, whereas the objects of history of philosophy are indeed bound to time and space (and to this extent individual) but traceable back to general laws of thought and therefore given universality.30 History of philosophy employs the scientific method but is not a science in the true sense; its object is treated according to the scientific method but in itself is not an absolute formal unity in that it maintains a connection with experience (Grohmann 1798, 45–6).

By way of example, for Spinoza God and the world are identical while others make a clear-cut distinction (Grohmann 1798, 48–9). The two systems are incompatible. Yet their origin is the same and is not in time but instead in the human mind’s way of thinking (the a priori of philosophical thought), which makes possible history of philosophy.31 Gurlitt gives an incomplete and inaccurate definition of philosophy32 since he takes its changeable external aspects (authors, contexts, works) to be the immutable ground of thinking on which philosophy is based. Evidence of this confusion is the use of the two adjectives “chronological and systematic” applied to history of philosophy when the one excludes the other (Grohmann 1797, 69). What is subject to change in universal history are events, facts, while in history of philosophy it is the (philosophical) systems. Nevertheless, whereas in the first facts derive from experience, in the second the systems are bound to the laws of thought, to how the mind works. The result is that regarding history of philosophy, philosophical systems as the internal product of thought need to be distinguished from the external changing of the philosophical spirit, namely the appearance in time and space of opinions, authors and works (Grohmann 1797, 73–4). Otherwise philosophy is the same as mathematics: purely formal, analytic knowledge (Grohmann 1797, 76). Neither does Gurlitt differentiate philosophy from history of philosophy. The latter has to be confined to the laws of thought and the philosophical systems; the former on the other hand establishes the scientific and immutable nature of philosophical ideas, grounding the history of philosophy a priori (Grohmann 1797, 79–80). It is not the task of history of philosophy to define philosophy. The fact is that between what changes (systems) and what does not change (philosophy) there is a qualitative jump and not a transition or progress. The single systems are based on the laws of thought—remaining isolated and self-contained one in respect of the other—but philosophy as science embraces them all and, above all, embraces thought and its laws wholly and rigorously (Grohmann 1797, 81).

A further example (Grohmann 1797, 93–4) shows that Spinoza’s system is derived from the one of Descartes, which has to do with pragmatic history (of historians) and not history of philosophy in a scientific sense. According to history of philosophy, the question to be put is, rather, what the internal (logical) connection is between Spinoza and Descartes. However, the point is not the division of tasks between philosophy and history of philosophy but, instead, the last word that is pronounced by philosophy, making the history of philosophy truly possible but also putting an end to any further version. The reason is that true philosophy (critical philosophy) reveals the genuine and ultimate connections between the laws of thought and therefore between the systems that have appeared in history, thereby enabling the first and last history of philosophy in conformity with the scientific method to be written, just as at the same time it endorses the end of philosophy itself.33

In Grohmann’s view, therefore, Kant (and, it needs to be recalled, not Hegel) is the last philosopher in as far as the discoverer of true philosophy, which puts an end to philosophy and history of philosophy but the latter, for the very same reason, has in the meantime come into being. It is precisely this paradox that the reviewer of Grohmann’s text seems to have sensed when he remarks that it is natural for every philosophical system to imply different notions of philosophy and, in turn, this changes the idea of history of philosophy.34

8. Between 1715 and 1725, Heumann’s Acta philosophorum opened up the way to the birth of the philosophical history of philosophy: history of philosophy as a new philosophical discipline. A periodical publication was much better suited than an essay to attempting to define a field of epistemology. Neither was philosophy of history, whose origin dates from around the middle of the XVIII century, born like Athena from the head of Zeus but after a long gestation involving different authors, divergent perspectives and intentions not always clear in themselves. Additionally, a review allowed for close and complex relations with more or less competent interlocutors, as well as with a broad and curious readership, demonstrated by continual references to Acta eruditorum.

Heumann’s aim was not simply scholarly or informative. On the basis of the nova philosophia, he reconsiders ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, and medieval and eastern philosophy including Biblical philosophy (but excluding the latter from true proper philosophy). He attributes an important function to philosophy in society and modern culture, inspired to know what is true in the natural and human world and pursue ethical-political freedom and happiness. The history of philosophical ideas, which had to be obtained through the criticism (critica) formulated by Humanism and felt the effects of the moral renewal introduced by the Reformation, serves to pave the way for the improvement of human societies that aspire to increasing mental and practical freedom. The influence of Heumann during the XVIII century was very widespread and deep-reaching and took effect both in (philosophical and other) reviews and on authors who wrote expressly on the history of philosophy. From Buddeus to Gurlitt, the definition of history of philosophy from the Greeks to the moderns, when the Geist des Zeitalters inspired throughout Europe the fostering of freedom of speech and thought and of ethical and political freedom,35 owed to Heumann and Acta philosophorum a first explicit step in that direction, which did not fail to include female philosophers.

Although the vitality of the entire German-speaking area can be pointed to with regard to the emergence of history of philosophy as part of the nova philosophia, it is impossible to overlook the importance of the University of Halle/Saale and of Prussian and Saxon milieus from the end of the XVII century. Here is not the place to dwell on this aspect. However, the central role of the University of Halle (founded in 1694) in these developments should be noted. It established itself as a complex breeding ground for the new culture characterized by the growing diffusion and improvement of knowledge. In this, the reviews made a decisive contribution (Löffler 2020) starting from Acta philosophorum and Nachrichten von einer Hallischen Bibliothek (1748–1751) without forgetting the tradition initiated in 1682 by Acta eruditorum (published in nearby Leipzig).

In conclusion, Acta philosophorum is not only the first philosophical review but, at the same time, the first review of philosophy that includes history of philosophy as a philosophical discipline. It was, furthermore, not by chance that this new idea of philosophy made its appearance in the Age of Enlightenment.

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