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Friedrich Max Müller und die idealistische Wurzel der Religionswissenschaft
The paper deals with the relationship of Max Müller’s project of science of religion to the German idealism. The development of Müller’s ideas was impossible without Kantian criticism (especially critics of natural theology and theory of the sublime), F. Schleiermacher’s philosophy of religion (especially in what concerns the separation between the religion and the theological doctrine) and F. Schelling’s and Chr. Weisse’s sketches of science of religion as a separate branch of knowledge. Two features distinguish Max Müller’s doctrine from the German idealistic mainstream. Firstly, Müller is orientalist and works with original literary monuments. Secondly, just this make him overstep the limits of the Western philosophical tradition, which usually determines itself more or less as Christian. The German idealism makes possible so important trait of science of religion as the recognition of distance between the reasoning about religion and personal religious conviction of the scholar.