Sascha Salatowsky’s research while affiliated with University of Erfurt and other places

This paper describes the affinities between Socinian and Unitarian materialism. Based on different philosophical traditions, the Socinian Christoph Stegmann and the Unitarian Joseph Priestley developed a strong “system of materialism” which fit very well with Christian doctrines and the Bible. The conviction that the whole man is material and therefore mortal became the common basis for these radical thinkers. Stegmann formulated within the Aristotelian tradition a “non-reductive” materialism in which matter, not form, became the fundamental principle of all living things. Priestley, on the other hand, created his “absolute” materialism by developing a new understanding of the concept of matter according to the philosophical rules of Isaac Newton. The paper will discuss the affinities and differences between these two different concepts of materialism. The idea of a thinking matter, most prominently formulated by John Locke, will serve as a link between them.

The philosophical allegation of imposture levelled by the Radical Enlightenment at Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad – the three founders of the monotheistic religions – has a complex theological history. Strange as it may sound, it is an idea closely connected to some of the “dangerous” debates conducted by scholastic theologians. Some of these theologians described divine omnipotence in a manner that prompted the vexed question of whether God can deceive us. Of course, no theologian doubted that God could and yet would not deceive us. However, for some scholastics, God permitted the Devil to deceive men. After the Reformation, the Devil assumed a central role in debates between the Christian denominations. Depending on one’s confessional allegiance, the Devil could be the Pope or Luther or Calvin. In this way, the churches of post-Reformation Europe contributed to a process by which the Devil was transformed into the human figure of the “impostor,” preparing the ground, as this article shows, for later, more radical criticisms of religion per se.

This is the first edition of three letters written by Prince August of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg to the German theologian Johann Gottfried Herder in the years 1784 and 1785. As son of the Duchess Louise Dorothea, Prince August was very familiar with the German and French Enlightenment. He intensely read works by Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius and similar authors and was able to form his own judgements, even on metaphysical treatises. He described, for example, Spinoza’s philosophy as “dry grammatical-metaphysical claptrap”. His letters to Herder are full of devastating irony, intelligent humour and wit. They give an interesting insight into the intellectual’s debates on literature, philosophy, theology, and arts which are clearly separated from political affairs. The Research Library of Gotha preserves a copy of nearly 200 letters of the prince to Herder.

The debates on toleration in the Confessional Age have not caught the interest of proponents of historical philosophy. Normally, they tend to locate the writings of Pierre Bayle or John Locke as the origins of modern philosophy. “Why?” one may ask. Perhaps the predominately religiously motivated discourse between theologians simply seems too remote. In this study, however, I attempt to demonstrate that a clear separation between theological and purely philosophical arguments was inconceivable in the 16th and 17th century. I will identify confessional differences in the debate on toleration and analyse the changes resulting from the religious and social transitions of the 17th century. In comparing Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran and Socinian views, the specific structural features of the confessions on the question of tolerating people of different faiths appear. Such a structural comparison demonstrates that the approach to the pressing issue of tolerating people of different faiths was not just based on personal attitudes, but on doctrine, whether of a theological or philosophical nature.