Perfectibilité et spontanéité. Les réflexions de Tetens sur une force fondamentale de l’âme dans le Onzième essai philosophique

Abstract

The question as to whether the human soul, in the abundance of its theoretical and practical faculties, possesses a fundamental power which unites them, or combines them, or several or none, was one of the controversial fields of European philosophy between Leibniz and Kant. Johann Nikolaus Tetens has presented an independent solution to this problem. At the same time, Tetens is as far removed from speculative dogmatism as from an empirical psychology of the basic power of the soul as a self-activity. Tetens formulates, as it were, conditions of the possibility of a knowledge of the human soul, based on experience, without proceeding methodically empirically.

Keywords

• theory of knowledge
• anthropology of the late Enlightenment
• fundamental force of the soul
• Johann Nikolaus Tetens
• Immanuel Kant
• transcendental philosophy