ABSTRACT
Clinton Tolley and R. Brian Tracz’s contribution sets forth the systematic account of experience that Tetens presents in his 1777 Philosophische Versuche ueber die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung. The essay places Tetens’s philosophy within the context of the reception of British empiricism within Germany, along with the contrasting accounts of experience and cognition given by those working in the Leibnizian tradition. On this basis, the authors first present Tetens’s own nuanced account of experience—as a psychological state with a specific structure that clearly goes beyond mere sensation—and then lay out Tetens’s presuppositions concerning the correct method for a philosophical account of experience. On both fronts, the authors challenge the prevailing assumption that Tetens is considerably more empiricist than that of his so-called rationalist contemporaries, showing how Tetens departs from Locke and Hume on key points and endorses countervailing theses from Leibniz. The authors conclude by revisiting the question of Tetens’s relation to Kant, pointing to Tetens’s close kinship to Kant’s account of the nature of experience, his philosophical methodology, and his response to Hume’s challenge to accounts of experience as a source of objective cognition.
