Lessing and the German Enlightenment. Edited by Ritchie Robertson. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013. xvii + 329 pages + 2 illustrations.  65.00.

AbstractIn this essay, I investigate Baumgarten’s doctrine of the six perfections of knowledge (wealth, magnitude, truth, clarity, certainty, and life), which is famously one of the most characteristic and enigmatic features of his philosophy. Recent scholarship has almost unanimously stressed the rhetorical background of the categories. Instead, I argue that Baumgarten elaborates his theory in close relationship with coeval philosophy. To support this claim, I examine the position of some Thomasian philosophers, such as Johann Liborius Zimmermann, who had indicated a list of criteria similar to that of Baumgarten. Moreover, I analyse the distinction between formal and material perfections, tracing it back to the Wolffian milieu. On these bases, I propose a new reconstruction of Baumgarten’s doctrine, with particular attention to its aesthetic application. Finally, I outline the reception of the six categories in the late German Enlightenment until Kant.

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Cultural Meaning for Women Composers: Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes and the Beautiful Dead in the German Enlightenment

Journal of the American Musicological Society ◽

10.1525/jams.2004.57.2.231 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 57 (2) ◽

pp. 231-284 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Matthew Head

Keyword(s):

Women Composers ◽

Fund Raising ◽

Close Friend ◽

Cultural Meaning ◽

Financial Loss ◽

Cultural Meanings ◽

German Enlightenment

This article explores the cultural meanings of female musical authorship in the late German Enlightenment through a case study of Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes, a composer, keyboardist, and opera singer. With Minna's death in 1788 at the age of twenty-three, her father, the playwright Johann Christian Brandes, and her close friend and teacher Johann Friedrich Höönicke prepared two memorials to her memory, a biography and a collection of her music, the latter titled Musikalische Nachlass von Minna Brandes (Hamburg, 1788). These memorials situated her authorship in the contexts of pedagogy and education, the composition of occasional works for the home, and the solace offered by music amidst bereavement and illness. The principal discourse was of death itself. Minna's memorialization shared with the novels of Goethe a topos of the beautiful female dead in which the female corpse (or its representation) was exhibited as a beautiful artifact. Death turned Minna from composer into a passive, aestheticized object of male authorship. These discursive contexts contained Minna's activities as a composer within a framework of bourgeois femininity. Both Minna's father and her teacher were at pains to stress that she sought neither fame nor fortune from her compositions. However, such representations of Minna were misleading. Her collected works suggest she was working toward a published collection of strophic German songs and toward the composition of operatic music for her own performance. The idealizing tropes of the memorials are also challenged by Johann Christian's later memoirs in which his daughter's turn to composition is situated in what he described as her multiple breaches of deferential daughterly conduct. Minna's reported profligacy during her final illness may have stimulated the posthumous publication of her music, which was possibly a form of fund raising for her multiply bereaved father, a corrective to his emotional and financial loss. The healthy list of 518 subscribers indicates that youthful female death was marketable as a topos occasioning the pleasures of melancholy.

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Scientific Themes in the Popular Literature and the Poetry of the German Enlightenment, 1720-1760.

MLN ◽

10.2307/2907258 ◽

1975 ◽

Vol 90 (5) ◽

pp. 707

Author(s):

Markus F. Motsch ◽

Walter Schatzberg

Keyword(s):

Popular Literature ◽

German Enlightenment

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Ofri Ilani. In Search of the Hebrew People: Bible and Nation in the German Enlightenment

Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations ◽

10.6017/scjr.v14i1.11353 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 14 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Aya Elyada

Keyword(s):

German Enlightenment

No abstract is available.

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Wilhelmine of Bayreuth and the German Enlightenment

Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198843894.003.0006 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 95-109

Author(s):

Paola Rumore

Keyword(s):

Roman Empire ◽

Holy Roman Empire ◽

Philosophical Debate ◽

Intellectual Engagement ◽

German Enlightenment ◽

Institutional Engagement

The chapter focuses on the figure of Princess Wilhelmine of Prussia (Friederike Sophie Wilhelmine, 1709–1758), Frederick the Great’s older and favourite sister, then Margravine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth. Wilhelmine plays a central role within the German philosophical debate in the 1740s. Her intellectual engagement comes out in an extraordinary clear way in her commitment to making Bayreuth one of the main intellectual centres of the Holy Roman Empire. The chapter focuses on Wilhelmine’s cultural and institutional engagement in the philosophical debate of the German Enlightenment on the basis of her philosophical reflections both in her correspondence with the most representative personality of the time and in her works.

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