Isaac von Sinclair e la ricerca per costellazioni. Verso un nuovo canone

The German diplomat, writer, and philosopher Isaac von Sinclair (1775-1815) was a close friend of Hölderlin and Hegel, and has not surprisingly long been overshadowed by them. This changed in the mid-1960s, when Dieter Henrich introduced a new methodology for looking at the very beginning of German Idealism, later called “constellation research”, and was moved to do so not least by an undervalued manuscript by Sinclair himself. As a consequence, Sinclair emerged to be anything but an insignificant figure for post-Kantian philosophy, and began to attract scholars’ interests in his own right. This essay aims to reconstruct this trend of research with a view to both clarifying whether and, if so, why Sinclair’s contribution should be given credit, and identifying what is still left to be done. It seems, indeed, that the step outside academia as yet remains unexplored