In this paper, the thematic context for Fichte’s early concern with the character of the forms of intuition, and specifically inner intuition, is adumbrated. This context is provided by means of a brief exposition of Kant’s doctrine of time as the form of inner sense, and its dual role; its positive role in the “order of (synthetic) cognition” or ordo cognoscendi, and its negative role in the critique of Seelenlehre or “doctrine of the soul.” It is then argued, on this (...) basis, that Fichte’s critique of Kant’s doctrine can serve as a principle for our understanding both of the context for, and the content of, Fichte’s early, propaedeutic writings, and thus of the character of the development of post-Kantian theoretical philosophy and doctrine of knowledge. The paper develops in three parts; through (1) an introduction, in which the importance of the theme to the development of German idealism is intimated, to (2) an exposition of the basic theses of Kant’s Sinnenlehre in the Critique of Pure Reason, and to (3) a summary of Fichte’s critique thereof, as this is set out in the Grundriss. (shrink)

The title already announces Henrich’s methodological reorientation, from the trajectory von Kant bis Hegel, to a constellation of post-Kantian theoretical philosophies comprehended as “three comparable and competing positions [those of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel] that cannot be reduced to each other”. Chapters 1 through 3 provide the context for the later content of the work by introducing the theme of the formal interdependence of mind and world, of “internal experience” and our experience of a law-governed world external to us. This (...) co-relation Henrich understands as fundamental to both Kant’s own and post-Kantian philosophy, theoretical and practical. Henrich takes as basic “the insight that mental activity always implies a world within which such activity occurs.” This yields the claim that “the concept of mind as the subject of knowledge is not possible without the idea of a world that laws govern”. Henrich then adumbrates the ways in which Kant’s account of the structure and dynamics of this relation were taken to be either problematic or insufficient in theoretical philosophy between Kant and Hegel. (shrink)