Feder was born on 15 May 1740 in the village of Schornweisach (now a part of Uehlfeld, Bavaria) in the Principality of Bayreuth, the son of Martin Heinrich Feder (? 1749), the village pastor. Feder studied theology and pedagogy at Erlangen. From 1768 to 1782 he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen. At the time of his death, in Hanover, he was Director of the Pageninstitut. His writings were widely read at the time due to their clear and tasteful mode of presentation. Feder decisively countered Kant's idealism. He gained notoriety through his abbreviation of Christian Garve's review of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. As philosopher Feder belonged to the better representatives of the eclectics tending towards the Leibniz Wolff School. The first edition of Logik und Metaphysik was published in 1769