Johann Christoph Schwab

Johann Christoph Schwab (10 December 1743 - 15 April 1821) was a Württemberg philosopher.

Johann Christoph Schwab was born in Ilsfeld, a small country town in the hills north of Stuttgart. His father was an accountant employed in the public service.

Schwab attended the University of Tübingen where he studied Philosophy and Theology, obtaining his degree in 1764. After this he spent eleven years working in the French speaking region to the north of Lake Geneva, taking a succession of tutoring posts. By the end of these years he had acquired a deep knowledge of French literature and of the French language. In 1778 he was appointed to a professorship for Logic and Metaphysics at the Hohe Karlsschule (academy) in Stuttgart. Friedrich Schiller was a student there at the same time.

Schwab was not an admirer of the new Kantian critical philosophical approach emanating from Königsberg. His lectures tended to ignore Kant. In numerous books and essays he refuted the significance of the new approach as a reformulation of old thought patterns: he took every opportunity to characterise Kant's contribution as insignificant and shot through with inconsistency and contradiction.

The spread of Kant's ideas had an increasingly polarising impact, and as he grew older Schwab moved from a position of nuanced conservatism, becoming progressively more "spirited" in his advocacy of the "traditional" philosophical structures identified by Leibniz and Wolff.

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