Richard Falckenberg and the modernity of Nicholas of Cusa

Richard Falckenberg (1851-1920) was among the first historians of philosophy to support the argument that Nicholas of Cusa was a modern philosopher. It is found especially in his book Grundzüge der Philosophie des Nicolaus Cusanus mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Lehre vom Erkennen (1880). Already in this work, in fact, Falckenberg puts forward a number of suggestions that little by little will become continual in the Cusanian historiography. Among them, above all the idea that the modernity of Cusanus is derived from his innovative theory of knowledge. The Falckenberg’s celebrity shall be reduced because his figure was later obscured by the most famous historians of philosophy, to which has been attributed the paternity of modern interpretation of Cusa, as Ernst Cassirer and Joachim Ritter. In our paper we want to come back to the Falckenberg’s book and recover in a schematic way his main arguments about the proximity of Cusanus with the philosophies of Leibniz, Fichte and the positivists.