ABSTRACT
In the first years of the nineteenth century, Johann August Starck, a cleric serving at the ducal court in Darmstadt, anonymously published Der Triumph der Philosophie im achtzehnten Jahrhunderte (‘The triumph of philosophy in the eighteenth century’, 1803). The title of this two-volume work effectively gave expression to its claim to have located the fulcrum around which so many events of the previous century had turned. Yet readers expecting a celebratory account of philosophy’s eighteenth-century achievements were quickly disabused of any such preconceptions upon opening the book. On its pages, Starck substituted the venerable term ‘philosophy’ with the distinctly derogatory ‘philosophism’. Although this movement celebrated its triumph by ‘bestowing on the eighteenth century the name of the enlightened, philosophical century’ (Starck 1803: I, 21), Starck’s sympathies lay with the traditional order secured by the prestige of religious and secular authorities. This prestige had been tragically and treacherously undermined by ‘philosophism’s’ intellectual assaults.
