Kant’s early readers were troubled by the appearance of a dilemma facing his theory of freedom. On the one hand, if we explain human actions according to laws or rules, then we risk reducing the activity of the will to necessity (the horn of determinism). But, on the other hand, if we explain human actions without laws or rules, then we face an equally undesirable outcome: that of reducing the will’s activity to mere chance (the horn of indeterminism). After providing (...) an overview of this dilemma, this chapter explores how Fichte and Schelling attempted to resolve it, in ways that ultimately shaped the course of post-Kantian idealism in the late 1790s and early 1800s. (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)

The present essay is devoted to analyzing Reinhold’s contribution to one of the most relevant questions in German idealism, namely, the possibility of an absolute principle of all philosophy, as a task left open by Kant’s critical enterprise. The main aim is to assess the extent to which Reinhold is the first to propose this philosophical problem as a question of language, and in doing so the possibility of an absolutely apodictic philosophical language, as it would be later resumed and (...) developed by Fichte and other authors. Keywords: Reinhold, language, philosophy, principle, consciousness. (shrink)

Firstly, this article will examine in the text of 1786, Was heisst: sich im Denken orientieren?, the chaining of the argumentation used by Kant to reply to the critique arised during the pantheism controversy about the passage from the finite to the infinite which became manifest in Germany in 1785 with the publication of: Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn, where the author shows that his moral argument of God offers an alternative for both (...) the supernatural anti-rationalism of Jacobi and the uncritical rationalism of Mendelssohn. And it also intends to examine the critique of Jacobi to the text above mentioned of Kant contained in Appendix of the: David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus, ein Gespräch. (shrink)

Schiller was one of many early post-Kantians who wrestled with Kant’s doctrine of radical evil, a doctrine that continues to puzzle commentators today. Schiller’s own explanation of why we are prone to pursue happiness without restriction is, I argue, subtle and multilayered: it offers us a new genealogy of reflective agency, linking our tendency to egoism to the first emergence of reason within human beings. On the reading I defend, our drive for the absolute does not lead us directly to (...) moral autonomy; rather, it misleads us to seek the absolute in the field of our own impulses and inclinations. However, since this detour is the result of cognitive error, it involves no willful subordination of the moral law to self-love, and so nothing that bears the guilt of evil. (shrink)

It is a question of ascertaining, at first, the difficulties that prevented Reinhold from carrying out the long-sought deduction of a free and absolute cause for freedom of will within the framework of elementary philosophy, or in the plan of the faculty of representation in general. In a second moment, I briefly analyze the author's new strategy when trying to carrying out, or at least to deepen, his foundational approach through practical philosophy. These two movements have Kantian philosophy as a (...) background. In fact, Reinhold takes this starting point after analyzing Kant’s work and considering it problematic in some points, mainly the foundation of the effectiveness of freedom in the fact of reason. Keywords: Reinhold, Kant, freedom, representation, foundation. (shrink)

Fichte’s early review of C. A. L. Creuzer’s neglected and idiosyncratic skeptical book on free will posed a serious challenge to what at the time was emerging as a consensus Kantian position on the role of free choice in the generation of imputable action. Fichte’s review was directed as much against Reinhold’s important letter on freedom of the will as it was against Creuzer himself. In the course of his brief review, Fichte suggests an important recasting of the strategy of (...) the Kantian postulates of rational faith; he poses a dilemma for the Reinholdian understanding of the relationship among an autonomous practical will, a free power of choice, and the actions of natural human organisms; and he hints at a radical reappropriation of the rationalist doctrine of pre-established harmony in re-orienting the search for a defensible reconstruction of a broadly Kantian position on the problem of free will. (shrink)

K.L. Reinhold’s interpretation of deduction plays a seminal role in the development of German Idealism. However, as yet Reinhold’s concept of deduction has not been sufficiently explained. The goals of this paper are to analyze Reinhold’s notion of deduction in his Neue Darstellung der Hauptmomente der Elementarphilosophie, to reconstruct his deduction of a priori forms of representation and to discuss his deduction critically. In doing so, I will present Reinhold’s objections against Immanuel Kant’s method in the Critique of Pure Reason.

This paper examines Fichte's conception of the freedom of choice in Das System der Sittenlehre of 1798 as a solution to the dilemma posed by determinism and indeterminism. It show that Fichte does not simply affirm an indifferent power of voluntary choice, but demonstrates how such a power might co-exist with the measure of regularity and lawfulness we normally admit of human choices. Particular choices do not occur at random, but are based on general reasons. These reasons are in turn (...) based on the extent to which we have freely reflected on our original drive. Thus our choices can be comprehended and predicted from the point of reflection from which we choose. This does not lead to the denial of the freedom of choice, but only to rethinking it in terms of the freedom of reflection: Though we cannot choose other than what we choose from the point of reflection we occupy, we can choose other than what we choose by raising or lowering ourselves through reflection to a higher or lower point of reflection. (shrink)