Few of the unjustly overlooked thinkers around 1800 stood at the intersection of intellectual tendencies as Friedrich Carl Forberg. As a student of the anthropologist Ernst Platner and the Illuminati Carl Leonhard Reinhold, as a fellow student and friend of the early Romantic Friedrich von Hardenberg, as a publisher of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and skeptic of his systems thinking, he challenged the various trends of his time primarily through criticism and denial. His central concern was to work out the atheistic dimension of Kant's philosophy and thus to fight for atheism's social right without taking up arms before French materialism.