Selected Writings from Vilnius Peroid (1804-1816)

oday, there are no longer any doubts that the German thinker Johann Heinrich Abicht (1762–1816), who intended to dedicate all his efforts to the victory of Immanuel Kant's philosophy, is considered a "Vilnius philosopher." When he arrived in Vilnius in 1804, the capital of Polish culture under partition, he became not only a citizen of this city but also inscribed himself in the history of Poland and Lithuania.

Abicht was the philosophy scholar who lectured for the longest period in the first half of the 19th century in the territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. From 1804, Abicht devoted his entire philosophical and educational activity to the university youth of Vilnius, just as he dedicated all his efforts to his new homeland.

He was the author not only of ambitious projects for the reform of the Vilnius University but also of many ideas concerning various aspects of social life. These projects and ideas illustrate the challenges encountered and the potential of the Polish-Lithuanian community in the first half of the 19th century, and a deeper look at the philosophy of the Vilnius professor reveals previously unrecognised alternative perspectives in the history of Polish philosophy.

All his Vilnius texts – philosophical, organisational, and educational – have been recovered from obscurity, mostly from manuscripts found in the last two decades. In this volume, we publish a representative selection of Abicht’s Vilnius lectures, his philosophical course projects, and several essential letters, all of them in original languages.

Many of them contain ideas that were ahead of their time but today form the foundation of academic life for the community of scholars and students. The efforts of Abicht to maintain a focus on the spiritual life of humans and philosophical education in a world where the natural sciences dominate seem familiar to us, not without reason.