ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the criticisms of Immanuel Kant by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Salomon Maimon, and Karl Leonard Reinhold that Rolf-Peter Horstmann has described as formative for German Idealism. Maimon is considered the source of the objection that Kant unnecessarily and falsely distinguished intuitions and concepts, although this charge cannot be reduced to a single pithy statement from his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy in the way that Jacobi's criticism. Kant's argument is: the propositions about the spatiality and temporality of the objects of knowledge are synthetic yet a priori, thus universal and necessary. Kant own master-argument for transcendental idealism may in fact be deeply problematic, but insofar as the German Idealists sought to find ways of overcoming transcendental idealism without ever having diagnosed why it should not have been accepted in the first place, their project may in turn have been deeply problematic.