As a philosopher, Crusius was nearly voted into oblivion, along with most other minor eighteenth-century philosophers, by idealistic historiographers. He was rediscovered by the new philological historiographers, chiefly in connection with his influence on Immanuel Kant.
Origin of Crusius's Thought
After 1730, Wolff and his school began to recover from his expulsion from Halle University in 1723, and from the loss by most of his pupils of their professorships, an attack launched for personal and political reasons by his Pietist opponents. The Pietists were gradually deprived of official support and were more and more restricted to theoretical controversy with Wolff. However, Wolff's system of philosophy was a much more modern, comprehensive, and technically refined body of doctrines than those in the obsolete and clumsy treatises of Thomasius, Franz Budde, and Andreas Rüdiger. A far-reaching reform in the doctrine and quality of Pietist philosophy was needed for it to face the Wolffian doctrine and counteract it successfully. Crusius's teacher, A. F. Hoffman (1703–1741), developed the logical doctrines of Thomasius and Rüdiger, taking into account Wolff's new philosophical techniques and achievements and accepting some of his doctrines, in his own Vernunft-Lehre (Leipzig, 1737).
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