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The contemporaries of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) openly acknowledged his towering importance.Both Fichte and Hegel praised him in the same breath with Kant as having launched the philosophical revolution they sought to complete.

In his famous Letter to Fichte, Jacobi described himself as a ‘privileged heretic’. In my paper I argue that this fascinating self-attribution is perfectly suited to gain a deep insight into Jacobi’s philosophy. This includes a structural analysis of his position, which both determines Jacobi’s central role in classical German philosophy and, in connection with this, allows an evaluation of the methodological requirements of Jacobi research. In three concrete steps, the article elaborates the characteristics of privileged heresy in order to finally emphasize the action-philosophical profile of Jacobi’s practical realism in contrast to post-Kantian concepts of a science of life.

The following article argues for the thesis that Hegel’s « Science of Logic » is dealing with the purpose of a post-metaphysical thinking. However, what is crucial here is not the overcoming of the so called « former metaphysics ». Crucial and problematic at the same time is rather Hegel’s famous but until now not sufficiently examined attempt to transform Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance into a new philosophy of subjectivity.