Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

Born 25 January 1743, Jacobi made his name attacking the very foundations of his era's philosophy. He took aim at Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, insisting their systems collapsed into nihilism — a term he coined and wielded as a warning. Against speculative reason he placed Glaube and Offenbarung: belief and revelation, the ground he thought philosophy had abandoned. His distance from the Sturm und Drang poets earned him a short-lived friendship with Goethe. He was the younger brother of poet Johann Georg Jacobi and father to psychiatrist Maximilian Jacobi. He died 10 March 1819, having…