Christian Garve 1742 – 1798
Christian Garve was a German philosopher of the late Enlightenment and one of the most widely read German Popularphilosophen of his generation. After a brief professorship at Leipzig, he spent his career as a private scholar in Breslau, where he produced a long series of moral and popular philosophical essays and translated Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero's De Officiis, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations into elegant German. His critical review of Kant's first Critique, published anonymously in 1782 in an abbreviated form by J. G. H. Feder, prompted Kant to write the Prolegomena and to revise the Critique itself, making him an unintended pivot of the critical philosophy.
Key facts
- Nationality
- German
- Era
- Modern
- Movements
- Enlightenment
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Christian Garve:
“Philosophy must speak in the language of educated humanity.”
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Attributed to Christian Garve:
“Moral feelings are the seedbed in which moral principles grow.”
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Attributed to Christian Garve:
“Translation is the labor of philosophy across cultures.”
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Attributed to Christian Garve:
“What is most subtle in metaphysics must still bear on practice.”
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Attributed to Christian Garve:
“Common sense is the soil in which higher reasoning takes root.”