Immanuel Kant, Universal Understanding, and the Meaning of Averroism in the German Enlightenment

Johann Joachim Lange, in his Caussa Dei et religionis naturalis adversus atheismum (1723), characterized the allegedly overbearing influence that scholastic Aristotelianism exercised upon Italian culture during the Renaissance as an atheistic infection (labes) that had later spread all over Europe, including Germany. In the period of time that goes from G. W. Leibniz to Immanuel Kant, German philosophers, especially the ones who moved in the orbit of Christian Wolff’s influential school of thought, were undoubtedly attracted to the notion of universal understanding. In many cases, as acknowledged by Johann Gottfried Herder, such a fascination with universality and necessity as the defining characteristics of the intelligible world betrayed the influence of a particular strain of Aristotelianism – Averroistic Aristotelianism. This chapter intends to revisit the well-known controversy between Herder and Kant on the meaning of Menschengeschlecht, history and universal understanding, and to provide a contextualization to the question concerning Kant’s Averroism.