Franz Xaver von Baader

Franz von Baader (27 March 1765 – 23 May 1841), born Benedikt Franz Xaver Baader, was a German Catholic philosopher, theologian, physician, and mining engineer. Resisting the empiricism of his day, he denounced most Western philosophy since Descartes as trending into atheism and has been considered a revival of the Scholastic school.

He was one of the most influential theologians of his age but his influence on subsequent philosophy has been less marked, and tends to be submerged into the esoteric discussions of later thinkers rather than cited explicitly in major publications. A notable exception to this tendency appears in the correspondence and later explication of the origins of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem's mystical project published after Benjamin's death where both Baader and Molitor are cited as catalytic to their exploration of the Kabbalah. An exemplar of the tendency to conceal Baader's influence shows up at an importance juncture in the thought of Martin Heidegger: Both Benjamin and Heidegger begin with similar problems derived from a revisitation of major issues in early scholastic thought in the 1913 seminar of Heinrich Rickert—a terrain towards which Baader points the way, and leaves his mark on the formulations of both Benjamin and Heidegger. Heidegger (characteristically) does not cite Baader's work directly: rather, his terminology and manner of speaking about the problem of evil suggest that he read Baader on this subject, tracing Schelling's formulations on theodicy to their roots in Baader on his way to the primary documents of Duns Scotus.

Today Baader is thought to have re-introduced theological engagement with Meister Eckhart into academia and even Christianity and Theosophy more generally. Provided by Wikipedia