The ‘Historia Philosophica’ in German Scholastic Thought

Abstract

The historiographical work produced in Germany during this period can be regarded as the equivalent of the type of scholarship that was being produced in the Netherlands and in England, during the same period, through the efforts of scholarly erudition and classical philology. While the German counterparts to the works of Vossius, Hornius, and Stanley were of lesser stature, a more important stage was reached with the historical-philosophical work of Jakob Thomasius (the teacher of Leibniz) and with the more modest, yet still significant, contributions of Tribbechow, Witte, and Colberg. There were particular social and cultural factors in Germany, by comparison with England and the Low Countries, that resulted in this difference in their intellectual production. There was no philosophical background comparable to that represented elsewhere by Bacon and the Cambridge Platonists, Descartes and Franco-Dutch Cartesianism. Instead, a grey and lifeless ‘school philosophy’ had developed, which managed to lay claim, with a degree of prudent caution, to its own limited sphere of action alongside the dominant orthodox Lutheran theology, and which, having embraced a certain type of Aristotelianism, remained strikingly closed and unreceptive to, as well as suspicious of, the Western novatores.