Reinhold’s Revision of Kant’s Program of a Critique of Reason

Martin Bondeli

Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757-1823) made his name as a Kantian who defended in his later path of thinking a system of rational realism and founded a theory of synonymy in the philosophy of language. In a time span ranging from 1785 to 1795 Reinhold perfected the results of Kant’s criticism. Non only that. He presented in a new systematic form Kant’s doctrine of theoretical and practical reason, which he claimed to have improved through the foundation on the principle of representation or consciousness. Reinhold blazed the trail for the post-Kantian systematic philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, for the early Romantic philosophy of principles, and for Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetic reflections, and also for the Kantian exegesis of Jakob Sigismund Beck, Wilhelm Traugott Krug and Jakob Friedrich Fries. Moreover, with his reading of Kant based on a theory of consciousness Reinhold initiated a philosophical approach, which was carried forward in the phenomenological works of Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl. In what follows I will explore Reinhold’s Kantian period and highlight the essential revisions and innovations characterizing it. I will limit myself to lay bare the relevance of this period for a continuing interpretation of Kant’s critical philosophy.

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