Jacobi on Kant's Moral Philosophy

It is difcult 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 infuential and original thinker, who had close intellectual relationships with all the major
philosophical fgures 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 difculties of Kant’s thought, and, on the other hand, compared with the latter, reveals a diferent conception of ethics. It will be shown that Jacobi’s criticism of Kant’s moral philosophy ofersinteresting suggestions also from the point of view of contemporary ethical theory.