Johann Augustus Eberhard

Johann Augustus Eberhard (August 31, 1739 – January 6, 1809) was a German theologian and "popular philosopher".

Life and career

Eberhard was born at

He was a master of the learned languages, spoke and wrote French fluently, and understood English, Italian and Dutch.[1]

Theological and philosophical work

Theology

Eberhard argued in books such as Neue Apologie des Socrates that salvation did not depend upon revelation, that it was possible for a heathen to go to heaven, and that the notion of eternal punishment contradicted its supposed aim of morally improving the sinner.

Philosophy

Eberhard argued in support of John Locke's position that all knowledge comes through the senses, but developed this into a full-blooded phenomenalism. In aesthetics he held a position that he called "subjective finalism", a label later adopted by Immanuel Kant: rather than being an objective property of objects, beauty is the relationship between the object and the representative power of the observer. For him, then, art should aim to awake and stimulate the pleasurable passions. According to Eberhard, aesthetic activity first appears in children's play.

In his position as editor of the Philosophisches Magazin (1788–1792) and the Philosophisches Archiv (1792–1795), Eberhard published many articles (most of which he wrote himself) critical of Kant. He argued that Kant's work was wholly derivative, simply adopting the work of

Works

• Neue Apologie des Socrates (two volumes, 1776–1778)
• Allgemeine Theorie des Denkens und Empfindens (Berlin, 1776), won the
  Royal Society of Berlin
  prize for that year
• Von dem Begriff der Philosophie und ihren Theilen (Berlin, 1778) — a short essay, in which he announced the plan of his lectures on being appointed to the professorship at Halle
• Lobschrift auf Herrn Johann Thunmann Prof. der Weitweisheit und Beredsamkeit auf der Universität zu Halle (Halle, 1779)
• Vorbereitung zur natürlichen Theologie (Halle, 1781), translated as Preparation for Natural Theology (Bloomsbury, 2016)
• Amyntor, eine Geschichte in Briefen (Berlin, 1782)
• Über die Zeichen der Aufklärung einer Nation (Halle, 1783)
• Theorie der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (Halle, 1783, third edition 1790)
• Vermischte Schriften (Halle, 1784)
• Neue vermischte Schriften (Halle, 1786)
• Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie (Halle, 1788), second edition with a continuation and chronological tables (1796)
• Versuch einer allgemeinen-deutschen Synonymik (Halle and Leipzig, 1795–1802, six volumes, fourth edition 1852–1853) — an abridgment was published by the author in one large volume (Halle, 1802)
• Handbuch der Aesthetik (Halle, 1803–1805, second edition 1807–1820).

Notes

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References

• Johann August Eberhard, Preparation for Natural Theology: with Kant's Notes and the Danzig Rational Theology Transcript, ed. and tr. by Courtney D. Fugate and John Hymers (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Part of the series Kant's Sources in Translation, ed. by Lawrence Pasternack and Pablo Muchnik.
• Giorgio Tonelli, "Johann August Eberhard", in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (Collier Macmillan, 1967)
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Eberhard, Johann Augustus". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 8 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 841.

External links

• "Eberhard, Johann August" .
  The American Cyclopædia
  . 1879.