Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (; ; 25 January 1743 – 10 March 1819) was a German philosopher, writer and socialite. He is best known for popularizing the concept of nihilism. He promoted the idea that it is the necessary result of Enlightenment thought and the philosophical systems of Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling.

Jacobi advocated ''Glaube'' (variously translated as faith or "belief") and ''Offenbarung'' (revelation) instead of speculative reason. According to one view, Jacobi can be seen to have anticipated present-day writers who criticize secular philosophy as relativistic and dangerous for religious faith. His aloofness from the ''Sturm and Drang'' movement was the basis of a brief friendship with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. However, belief can also be understood in terms of a commonsense realism or as a proto-phenomenolgical approach to the given, aimed at avoiding the pitfalls of dogmatic foundationism on the one hand and a pure subjectivism on the other. These interpretative debates around Jacobi's thought continue to this day.

He was the younger brother of poet Johann Georg Jacobi and the father of the great psychiatrist Maximilian Jacobi. Provided by Wikipedia