Johann Bernhard Merian

Johann Bernhard Merian or Jean-Bernard Mérian (28 September 1723, Liestal – 12 February 1807, Berlin) was a Swiss philosopher active in the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin.

Merian studied at the University of Basle, gaining his doctorate in 1740. He became a member of the Class for Speculative Philosophy of the Berlin Academy in 1750, and director of the Class for Belles-Lettres in 1771. From 1797 he was permanent Secretary of the Academy.^[1]

Merian translated the work of David Hume into French. He published widely in the Mémoires of the Academy. A series of essays on the Molyneux problem appeared in the 1770s.^[2]

References

1. Thiel, Udo (2006), "Merian, Johann Bernhard", in Haakonssen, Knud, The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, 2, Cambridge University Press, p. 1204
2. These have been edited and republished as Sur le problème de Molyneux, ed. F. Markovits, Paris, 1984

External links

• Works by or about Johann Bernhard Merian in libraries (WorldCat catalog)