Ik vind het wel aardig voor dit blog een passage te citeren uit de recensie van Ben Crowe (van de University of Utah) die vandaag verscheen op Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews [NDPR] van dit boek van
John H. Smith, Dialogues Between Faith and Reason: The Death and Return of God in Modern German Thought, Cornell University Press, 2011, 309pp., $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780801477621.
….
"But, there remain significant gaps in Smith's narrative, gaps that compromise the degree to which he succeeds in conveying the full richness and importance of the German tradition whose story he is telling. In view of Smith's detour outside of the German tradition in Chapter 2 (where he covers Descartes, Spinoza, and Pascal), one wishes that more attention had been given to some of the crucial moments within that tradition. One of these significant gaps involves G.E. Lessing, a figure whom Smith barely discusses in a chapter otherwise dedicated to Kant, but who was probably the most important German religious thinker of the eighteenth century prior to Kant. Lessing's interventions in public discourse, including especially his notorious exchange with Jacobi about Spinoza, were genuine watershed moments that shaped the course of religious thought for at least fifty years. Indeed, Smith barely alludes to the "Spinoza Controversy" of the 1780s, about which nearly every major German intellectual of the period (Jacobi, Mendelssohn, Kant, Herder, Fichte, the Jena Romantics, Hölderlin, Schelling, Hegel, etc.) had quite a lot to say. Smith similarly skips over two other Jacobi-instigated controversies, about Fichte's "atheism" (1798-99) and Schelling's "pantheism" (which came to a head around 1811)." [van NDPR]