Аннотация:F. H Jacobi’s philosophy, such as a philosophy of the circle of thinkers to
which he belonged (J. G. Hamann, F. Hemsterhuis), may seem like a peripheral
phenomenon in the philosophy of the last quarter of XVIII – first quarter of the
XIX century. But a closer acquaintance with his philosophy urges to think that F.
H. Jacobi (1743-1819) often goes ahead of his time in the way he poses the
philosophical questions. One of the most important examples of this is the
development of the question of scientific (“proven”) knowledge as rooted in the
pre-scientific experience ("knowledge without proof" - F. H. Jacobi calls it
"belief"). The question of the relationship between the experience and scientific
knowledge was raised, of course, in the XVIII century by the British empiricists,
the philosophers of the French Enlightenment, and by I. Kant, but all these
thinkers suppose that the field of knowledge is homogeneous; they don’t see any
qualitative difference between the scientific knowledge and the knowledge of the
world in the pre-scientific experience. F. H. Jacobi, on the contrary, seeks to show
the qualitative and systematic difference between the scientific knowledge and the
knowledge in the pre-scientific experience: pre-scientific knowledge, "knowledge
without proof," "necessarily precedes knowledge, obtained by proof, justifies it,
and constantly sways over it." This way of thinking brings F. H. Jacobi close to the
philosophy of W. Dilthey, phenomenological philosophy of the XX century, and
M. Heidegger’s philosophy. The ground of the pre-scientific knowledge is for F.
G. Jacobi a perceptual experience. This brings him close both to the sensualists of
the XVIII century and to the phenomenologists of the XX century, in particular,
M. Merleau-Ponty. But, unlike the sensualists, F. H. Jacobi argues that along with
such form of receptivity as sensation, there is another, qualitatively different from
it form of receptivity, which he calls “feeling”. According to Jacobi, feeling is a
reception of ideas in the way Plato defines them, and this form of receptivity is
inherent to the reason. In such a consideration of the feeling, Jacobi is moving
away from Kant and towards Plato, removing Kant’s denial of the intellectual
intuition. This move allows him to reveal some important aspects of the human
perception. What these aspects are, we will attempt to show in our report, tracing
the interrelations between sensation, feeling and belief in the F. H. Jacobi’s
philosophy.