German philosophy in the 17th century

11 March 2020 - 111 words - less than 1 minute read

The scholar was not kind to his colleagues from the 17th century, opening his overview by saying that history had not been unfair when it had forgotten about these German philosophers from the 17th century. They should be mentioned because they formed the substrate from which real philosophers would emerge, but they didn’t deserve much attention at all. They mostly wrote encyclopedias of random contents, not even with much method for most of them.

That sounds about right - I have encountered other “philosophers” like that in other periods, mostly in the Middle Ages, and nothing much is lost by skipping their musings on angels and other fantastical or metaphysical nonsense.