G. F. Meier’s Received Reviews

This paper investigates the reviews to works of Georg Friedrich Meier in relation to questions such as the specificity of individual journals, the restraints imposed by religious denominations, the actual impact of reviews on controversies, and the relation between reviews and the institutions that supported or hindered them. The first part reconstructs Meier’s overall impact at the newly instituted University of Halle during the decades of his teaching (since 1739) and research (to his passing in 1777). The second part examines the journals that published reviews of Meier’s works, their confessional and institutional bindings. The third part examines the content of some famous reviews written by Moses Mendelssohn and Thomas Abbt, which are startling example of how some tendencies can be identified to privilege some perspectives instead of others. The fourth part considers the impact of Meier’s received reviews on philosophical issues of the time, especially about the relations between the University of Halle and the University of Königsberg, both under the administration of the Prussian Etats-Ministerium as regards Kant’s planned succession on the professorship held by Meier.