Johann Georg Hamann

Johann Georg Hamann (1730 to 1788) was a German Lutheran philosopher from Königsberg, known by the pen name the Magus of the North. After a mystical experience in London in 1758 he underwent a profound Christian conversion and reoriented his life and thought around the Bible. He introduced his fellow townsman Immanuel Kant to the work of David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and he used Hume's arguments to defend rather than attack Christianity. Long before the linguistic turn he held that epistemology should be replaced by the philosophy of language. His student Johann Gottfried Herder drew on his work for the Sturm und Drang movement, and Goethe and Kierkegaard counted him among the finest minds of his time.