JACOBI ON KANT'S MORAL PHILOSOPHY

It is difficult to overestimate Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's role in the German philosophical debate between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. Jacobi is an influential and original thinker, who had close intellectual relationships with all the major philosophical figures of his time. However, in the framework of a remarkable Jacobi-Renaissance in the last 50 years, Jacobi's practical philosophy seems relatively neglected. The paper examines Jacobi's discussion of Kant's ethics and aims at focusing on Jacobi's position, which, on the one hand, points out genuine difficulties of Kant's thought, and, on the other hand, compared with the latter, reveals a different conception of ethics. It will be shown that Jacobi's criticism of Kant's moral philosophy offers interesting suggestions also from the point of view of contemporary ethical theory.