This is a draft translation of the fourth letter of G.E. Schulze's Aenesidemus. Comments and corrections welcome.

This is a draft translation of the first letter of G.E. Schulze's Aenesidemus. Comments and corrections welcome.

G.E. Schulze's Aenesidemus, despite its importance for the development of post-Kantian idealism, has not been fully translated into English. Now and then, when I have time, I will upload draft translations of parts of the text here, with the goal of, at some point, providing a complete translation. These drafts will be rough and I welcome feedback! -/- This document contains only the Title page, Schulze's indication of the contents of the work, and the preface.

This is a translation of the short, third letter in G.E. Schulze's Aenesidemus, without its lengthy appendix. -/- Excerpts of the appendix which follows this letter have been translated into English by George di Giovanni in Between Kant and Hegel, eds. G. di Giovanni and H.S. Harris, (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 2000).

The Chinese rites controversy is typically characterized as a religious quarrel between different Catholic orders over whether it was permissible for Chinese converts to observe traditional rites and use the terms tian and shangdi to refer to the Christian God. As such, it is often argued that the conflict was shaped predominantly by the divergent theological attitudes between the rites-supporting Jesuits and their anti-rites opponents towards “accommodation.” By examining the Jesuit missionary Kilian Stumpf's Acta Pekinensia—a detailed chronicle of the (...) papal legate Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon's 1705–6 investigation into the controversy in Beijing—this article proposes that ostensibly religious disputes between Catholic orders consisted primarily of disagreements over ancient Chinese history. Stumpf's text shows that missionaries’ understandings of antiquity were constructed through their interpretations of ancient Chinese books and their interactions with the Kangxi Emperor. The article suggests that the historiographical characterization of the controversy as “religious” has its roots in the Vatican suppression of the rites, which served to erase the historical nature of the conflict exposed in the Acta Pekinensia. (shrink)