Meier, Georg Friedrich: About Logic, Aesthetics and Rhetoric in German Enlightenment Philosophy

In accordance with the eighteenth-century’s understanding of logic, Georg Friedrich Meier’s Vernunftlehre and its abridgement for courses, the Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre (both of which appeared in 1752), are at the same time and especially an introduction to the whole of philosophy. Their systematic goal does not consist exclusively in the elaboration of the formal aspects of logic, but rather in the individuation of the elements of thought and language which make human understanding possible. Instead of limiting himself to formal truth, Meier investigates thoroughly the realm of epistemic, aesthetic, and historic truths. Meier’s logic is at the same time rhetoric and is defined at the beginning of both books as “a science dealing with the rules of learned cognition and of learned speech.” Kant used Meier’s Vernunftlehre as well as its Auszug for about forty years in his logic-lectures (Kant read in class an interleaved copy of the Auszug). It happens, thus, that Kant’s logic, and also his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, were influenced by Meier beginning with the terminology.