Although the “Transcendental Aesthetic” is the briefest part of the first Critique, it has garnered a lion's share of discussion. This fact reflects the important implications that Kant drew from his arguments there. He used the arguments concerning space and time to display examples of synthetic a priori cognition, to secure his division between intuitions and concepts, and to support transcendental idealism. Earlier, in the years around 1770, Kant's investigations into space and time had facilitated his turn toward “critical” philosophy. (...) Prior to that time, Kant's main interests in space and time pertained to physics and metaphysics. As he entered the critical period, he delved into the cognitive basis of our experience of space (and time), and drew his conclusions about their ideality. Kant's doctrines of space and time provoked extensive response in his own time and throughout the nineteenth century. These responses variously concerned the metaphysics, physics, epistemology, psychology, and geometry of space. Throughout the nineteenth century, philosophers, physiologists, and psychologists sought to extend or to refute Kant's theories of space. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, many had rightly concluded that the existence of non-Euclidean geometry as a candidate description of physical space refuted Kant's full doctrine of space - though some have hoped that his position might be saved by restricting it to “visual space.”. (shrink)

Abstract: In this paper I consider the significant but generally overlooked role that the French Revolution played in the development of German Idealism. Specifically, I argue that Reinhold and Fichte's engagement in revolutionary political debates directly shaped their interpretation of Kant's philosophy, leading them (a) to overlook his reliance upon common sense, (b) to misconstrue his conception of the relationship between philosophical theory and received cognitive practice, (c) to fail to appreciate the fundamentally regressive nature of his transcendental argumentative strategy, (...) and, ultimately, (d) to seek to deduce his philosophy from a single first-principle, one grounded in the immediate awareness of the subject's mental life. (shrink)

Those of us who are sympathetic to Kantian ethics usually are so because we regard it as an ethics of autonomy, based on rational self-esteem and respect for the human capacity to direct one’s own life according to rational principles. Kantian ethical theory is grounded on the idea that the moral law is binding on me only because it is a law proceeding from my own will. The ground of a law of autonomy lies in the very will which is (...) to be subject to the law, and this leaves no room for any issue about why this will should obey the law. The idea of autonomy also identifies the authority of the law with the value constituting the content of the law, in that it bases the law on our esteem for the dignity of rational nature in ourselves, which makes every rational being an end in itself. (shrink)

While almost all of Kant's contemporaries agreed that the Critique of Pure Reason effected a philosophically epochal change, there was far less consensus about what precisely Kant's new critical philosophy had brought about. In large part, this uncertainty was a result of a methodological crisis that Kant's work had sparked: the Critique had shown that traditional dogmatic metaphysics was suspect at best, but what new methods needed to be adopted in the wake of Kant's 'Copernican Revolution'? The Critique stood as (...) the lighting rod at the center of a complicated and especially lively set of debates and disputes that erupted in Germany in the late 1780s and early 1790s: empiricists and rationalists, threatened by the 'all-destroying Kant', leapt to challenge the new critical system; skeptics attacked Kant's claims to have secured a sure footing for empirical knowledge; a few ambitious thinkers sought to complete the critical system by revealing a foundational first principle on which Kant's system could rest. All of these elements conspired to make the early stages in post-Kantian thought one of the richest, most vibrant – and most fascinating – periods in the history of philosophy. The present essay looks at the various figures of the move from Kant to Fichte, and presents some of the excellent new research on the era that has appeared in the last decade or so. The sequel takes up the period from Fichte to Hegel, with an eye toward understanding how Kantian critical philosophy gave way to Hegelian Absolute Idealism. (shrink)

This article examines Charles Villers's Essay on the Spirit and Influence of Luther's Reformation (1804) in its intellectual and historical context. Exiled from France after 1792, Villers intervened in important French and German debates about the relationship of religion, history, and philosophy. The article shows how he took up a German Protestant discussion on the meaning of the Reformation that had been underway from the 1770s through the end of the century, including efforts by Kantians to seize the mantle of (...) Protestantism for themselves. Villers's essay capitalized on a broad interest in the question of Protestantism and its meaning for modern freedom around 1800. Revisiting the formation of the narrative of Protestantism and progress reveals that it was not a logical progression from Protestant theology or religion but rather part of a specific ideological and social struggle in the wake of the French Revolution and the collapse of the Old Regime. (shrink)