Christian Garve

Christian Garve
Moral philosophy

Christian Garve (7 January 1742 – 1 December 1798) was one of the best-known philosophers of the late Enlightenment along with Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn.

Life

Christian Garve was born into a family of manual workers and died aged 56 in his parental home. He studied in

"Friedrich zum goldenen Zepter" ("Frederick of the Golden Scepter").

Garve became well-known particularly for his intensive activity as a translator (producing versions of, e.g.,

, who bestowed upon him a pension of 200 thalers. Garve eulogized Frederick in the Fragmente zur Schilderung des Geistes, Charakters and der Regierung Friedrichs II. (1798).

He composed psychological, moral and economic texts and reviews for the Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste ("New Library of the Beautiful Sciences and Free Arts"). He was strongly marked by the influence of the

ethics. He never formulated his essentially empirical philosophy in terms of a system, publishing his thought in the form of remarks and essays. As a result, he was reproached for being merely a shallow Popularphilosoph (popular philosopher), a reputation he has retained, and his writings did much toward the popularization of philosophy in Germany.

Of interest is his engagement with Immanuel Kant, which was initiated by a review of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in the Göttinger Gelehrten Anzeigen ("Göttingen Learned Advertiser") which had been shortened by the Göttingen philosopher Johann Georg Heinrich Feder. Kant felt himself to have been misunderstood, and complained bitterly about the review in the Appendix to his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will Henceforth Come Forward as a Science. When the original, longer review was published by Garve in the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek ("General German Library"), it still attracted Kant's censure. Kant consequently wrote his own Anti-Garve. This program in time expanded into Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. The intellectual engagement between Kant and Garve extended up to Garve's death of cancer^[1] in 1798.

Edition of Garve's works

• Gesammelte Werke, ed. K. Wölfel, 15 vols. completed, 1985-

Works translated by Garve

• Edmund Burke, Über den Ursprung unserer Begriffe vom Erhabenen und Schönen [A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful], Riga, 1773
• Adam Ferguson, Grundsätze der Moralphilosophie [Institutes of Moral Philosophy], Leipzig 1772
• Aristotle, Ἠθικά [Ethics] (1798-1801)
• Aristotle, Πολιτικά [Politics] (1799-1802)

Notes

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
  New International Encyclopedia
  (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.

External links

• Christian Garve in the German National Library catalogue
• Profilansicht Garves
• Popularphilosophie und Volkskunde. Christian Garve (1742-1798)
• Über den Charakter der Bauern und ihr Verhältniss gegen die Gutsherrn und gegen die Regierung, Frankfurt 1790 (PDF)