Christian Garve

Christian Garve (7 January 1742 to 1 December 1798) was one of the best known philosophers of the late German Enlightenment, ranked beside Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn. Born into a family of manual workers, he studied at Frankfurt an der Oder and Halle, took a master's degree in 1766 and was extraordinary professor of mathematics and logic at Leipzig from 1770 to 1772, then retired to Breslau because of ill health and lived there as a bookseller and private scholar. He translated Cicero's De Officiis, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and works of Burke, Ferguson and Aristotle. His essays on psychological, moral and economic questions were marked by the English and Scottish Enlightenment and by Stoic ethics, and he never built a system, which earned him the label of a popular philosopher. His review of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason provoked Kant to write an appendix to his Prolegomena and the Anti-Garve.