Abstract

Bondeli delves into Ith’s philosophic production with great detail. Ith delivers a psychologistical interpretation of Kant. In fact, he places the contents of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason before the exposition of the logic itself. He considers Kant’s critical philosophy as a prodeutic, because cognition comes before thinking. As a matter of fact, Ith follows very closely post-Kantian logicians such as Carl Leonhard Reinhold, Johann Heinrich Abicht, and Johann Gottfried Carl Christian Kiesewetter. Ith is also the author of an anthropology that shows Kantian influences. Bondeli then considers Ith’s direct disciple and fellow disseminator of Kantian doctrines, Philipp Albert Stapfer, who was the author of a philosophy of history occasioned by the rebirth of the Helvetian Republic in 1797. Connected to Ith and Stapfer is also the question of the contacts that the young Hegel might have had during his stay at Berna and Tschugg in 1793 and 1794. While the question regarding Hegel’s contacts is still open, we know much more about Fichte’s stay in Zürich in the Spring of 1794, when he delivered the lectures of the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo in the house of Johann Kasper Lavater. In Bern, Fichte was welcomed by his German friend, Jens Baggesen, a Fichtean in philosophy, and from his disciple, Johann Rudolf Steck, also a Fichtean. This is a very learned book. Bondeli provides a very instructive contribution to the understanding of the essence and development of Swiss philosophy.-Riccardo Pozzo, University of Verona.