Geschichte von den Seelen der Menschen und Thiere pragmatisch entworfen

The question of the nature of the human soul and its relationship to the body is one of the central issues in the philosophy of the modern age. We need only think of the well-known “three systems” of physical influence (Descartes), of occasionalism (Malebranche) and Leibniz’s theory of pre-stabilised harmony. Justus Christian Hennings Geschichte von den Seelen der Menschen und der Thiere (1774) contains a systematisation and doxography of the genre of anti-materialist works, distinguishing between no fewer than 24 types of argument against materialism and for the immateriality of the soul. Together with Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), Henning’s Geschichte is one of the central sources for the understanding of modern materialism.
With an introduction by Falk Wunderlich.