FRIES, JACOB FRIEDRICH. - Philosopher, born at Barby (Saxony) on 23 Aug. 1773, died at Jena on 10 Aug. 1843. He was educated in the schools of the Pietist confraternities and subsequently studied at the Universities of Leipzig and Jena, where from 1816 he was professor of philosophy.
F. sought, in opposition to idealism, to recover the doctrine and spirit of Kantian philosophy. His interpretation, however, does not preserve the idea of a transcendental critique, insofar as it transfers the deduction of the primary principles of thought to the psychological and anthropological plane. In his philosophy of religion F. enriches the moralistic conception of the Enlightenment with Pietist and Romantic motifs. His doctrine of a specifically religious way of experiencing and ascertaining the Divine was accepted and developed by some of the most influential Protestant theologians (W. Bousser, R. Otto). At the beginning of this century, F.’s philosophy found a successor in L. Nelson, founder and leader of the so-called neo-Friesian school.
Principal works: Handbuch der praktischen Philosophie, I: Ethik... (Heidelberg 1818); II: Religionsphilosophie... (ibid. 1823); Neue Kritik der Vernunft (3 vols., 2nd ed., ibid. 1828-32); System der Metaphysik (ibid. 1824); Wissen, Glaube und Ahndung (new ed. by L. Nelson, Göttingen 1905).
ihre Anverndung auf die Theologie, Tübingen 1909; A. Kastil, Fa Lehre von der unmittelbaren Ethenotais, Göttingen 1922; J. Maréchal, Le point de départ de la métaphysique, IV, Brussels 1947, pp. 457-70. Reda Thum