Metaphysical foundations of Johann Georg Schwarz’s pedagogical practice

Abstract

J. G. Schwarz performs his work, when the Russian philosophy is just taking the first steps and when the aesthetics is being prepared in Europe as a new branch of philosophy. Under these conditions the personality of Schwarz appears as a transitional one and very attractive for the historical and philosophical research. The paper demonstrates the transitional nature of Schwarz philosophy by dint of his notion of taste, since it contains moral features of the previous period and the purely aesthetic features that Kant would eventually attached to it. The notion of taste in Schwarz’s account makes it possible to connect, on the one hand, a kind of quite eclectic philosophy of freemasonry, which includes the theory of the human’s entity triple structure and the intermediate status of the human being between the material and the spiritual worlds, and, on the second hand, the specific pedagogical practice, that remains relevant in the present.