Vernunft ist Sprache

The word ‹Metakritik‹ (metacriticism), which is a popular philosophical expression today, was discovered or invented by the Königsberg journalist and author Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) in the course of an intensive study of Kant‹s ‹Kritik der reinen Vernunft‹ (Critique of Pure Reason). This book provides the first consistent and comprehensive commentary on the ‹Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft‹ (Metacritique of the Purism of Reason) (1784) and its explanatory notes. In the language of his thought, Hamann was a crucial intermediary between Anglo-Saxon empiricism and early idealism in Germany. Apart from its specific critique of Kant, Hamann‹s ‹Metacritique‹ is of interest mainly for the philosophy of language and religion from a systematic perspective and also from the perspective of the history of philosophy.