Günter Arnold: „…der größte Mann in Deutschland in denneuern Zeiten gehabt“ – Herders Verhältnis zu Leibniz

In May 1785 Georg Forster wrote to a friend: “Herder is quite a Leibnizian thinker”. The following paper on Herder’s reception of Leibniz I have read in the Leibniz Society on April 1, 2004. Previously to that time Herder scholars traditionally had prefered Spinoza as the favourite philosopher of Herder’s. As for Leibniz they had in view only Herder’s natural philosophy. – First I describe some documents of reception: manuscripts, sermons and letters, especially of the young Herder. After that the fundamental conceptions and principal thoughts of Herder’s chief works are reduced to Leibnizian ideas, concerning the theory of language and cognition, the individuality of man and the immortality of the soul, the unity of natural and human history, the organic forces, evolution and the “laws of nature”. Finally Herder’s late essays on Leibniz are compared with their literary sources which have been unknown hitherto.

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