Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi 1743 – 1819

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi was a German philosopher whose writings precipitated the so-called pantheism controversy of the 1780s and shaped the philosophical agenda of German Idealism. His Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza argued, against Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment rationalists, that consistent Enlightenment philosophy leads inevitably to Spinozist pantheism, and that Spinozism leads in turn to fatalism and to nihilism, a term he used in something close to its modern sense. Against this trajectory he defended a leap of faith anchored in immediate certainty, anticipating later anti-rationalist movements.