"Different Times are not Simultaneous, but Successive": Spinoza between Jacobi and Herder

With the Letters to Moses Mendelssohn on the doctrine of Spinoza Jacobi puts in place an intervention of great importance in the theoretical-political conjuncture of the Aufklärung: it lets enter the scene the Spinoza’s Gost by projecting it on Leibniz, Lessing, and Kant. In particular, he will accuse Kant of having proposed, in the Critique of Pure Reason, a theory of space and time in the “Geist des Spinoza”. In this article I reconstruct the reasons that have allowed Jacobi to conduct this operation by putting it in tension with the criticisms of the “transcendental aesthetics” that we find in Herder’s Metacritica, where a theory of plural temporality inspired by Spinoza is explicitly affirmed against Kant.