Abstract

This book contains material from some 15 years of scholarly work on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and its reception by his immediate successors. While large parts of the book rely on previously published articles, Ameriks has worked these earlier publications into a monographic study by integrating them into an overall argument now prefaced by a detailed introduction to the book’s main thesis and rounded out by a conclusion that provides a “final perspective” on the study as a whole. The central thesis of the book may be summarized as follows. The reception of Kant’s philosophy by his contemporaries and immediate successors, and above all by Fichte and Hegel, was decisively influenced by the way in which Reinhold transformed the Kantian enterprise into a foundationalist system in which all propositions were to be derived from a first grounding principle. This is significant because in the process Reinhold “managed to distort the basic meaning of Kant’s original doctrine”. As a result, German idealism after Kant can by no means be said to be the continuation and completion of Kant’s Copernican revolution. Rather, Kant’s position constitutes an “alternative to this ambitious foundational project”. The post-Kantian development thus breaks with Kant’s much more modest view of what a system of philosophy can and should be. A crucial role in this process of misinterpretation of Kant’s intentions falls to Reinhold’s recasting of what Ameriks calls Kant’s “long argument to idealism” into Reinhold’s “short argument”, that is, the exclusive reliance by Reinhold on the argument from representation according to which the thing-in-itself is “unrepresentable” and hence dispensable. The Reinhold of the “Elementary Philosophy” of 1789–91 thus believed to possess a shortcut to idealism which made Kant’s complicated justification of the complementarity thesis redundant. It also established the immanence of representational consciousness as the exclusive ground of all claims to knowledge and thus prepared the way for the closed, “absolutist” systems that became the hallmark of post-Kantian idealism. Ameriks unfolds this argument in four parts dealing first with Kant’s more modest claims concerning system and knowledge as a backdrop for the subsequent discussion, the motivation for and the content of Reinhold’s revision of Kant’s philosophy, Fichte’s practical foundationalism as inspired by Reinhold, and Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy. The book covers other topics as well such as an illuminating discussion of the notion of apperception in Kant and Fichte as compared to contemporary interpretations of the apperception theory. The introduction also argues for a compatibilist alternative to Kant’s theory of freedom which would minimize Kant’s metaphysical commitment to the existence of an absolute spontaneity and thus make Kant’s position an even more modest one.