Reason’s Changing Needs: From Kant to Reinhold

Kant's a priori history of metaphysics: Systematicity, progress, and the ends of reason

“…Instead, what is required for a genuinely historical conception is that reason itself rather than its manifestations in the empirical world be conceived as subject to development throughout time. According to Breazeale, this is precisely what Reinhold's “astonishingly original conception” of the “historicity of reason” consists in (Breazeale, 2010, p. 90). Namely, Reinhold “defends a thoroughly historical conception of the ‘interests” or ‘needs” of reason as changing over time and in different circumstances” (2010, p. 90).…”

“…Breazeale describes the Reinholdian conception in the following manner: “Reason itself develops and advances over time, and… it does so largely by means of conflict with itself and by coming to terms with and overcoming its own prior history” (Breazeale, 2010, p. 99). This dialectic of conflict and overcoming is the driver behind a stage‐based understanding of reason, in which “at each stage of its development it faced specific needs that drove it to the next and higher stage of its development” (2010, p. 105).…”

“…For example, Schelling took his 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism to have introduced the notion of historical development into philosophy, thereby initiating what he called a “tendency towards the historical” (Schelling, 1994, p. 109; see Bernstein, 2004). Most recently, commentators have focused on Reinhold's even earlier contribution (especially Ameriks, 2017 and Breazeale, 2010). According to their account, Reinhold's historicisation of the atemporal form of reason he found in Kant made him the initiator of a “historical turn” in philosophy, which was then deepened and developed by his more famous successors.…”

“…For example, Yovel (1980, p. 21) concludes that “no mediation between reason and empirical history is conceivable” within the Kantian framework. Though he can accommodate empirical developments in morality or religion, Kant is thus taken to defend an ahistorical conception of reason (see, among others, Breazeale, 2010, pp. 91–97, Ameriks, 2006, p. 5, or Beiser, 2011, p. 147).…”

Fichte, Kant e l’orientarsi nel pensare

“…Si tratta di un testo determinante per la ricezione della filosofia di Kant all'indomani della pubblicazione della prima critica, soprattutto per comprendere le torsioni dell'impianto epistemologico della prima critica in una discussione che, in Fichte così come in Reinhold, si concentra progressivamente sulla deduzione genetica del primato del pratico. Sul rapporto tra le Lettere renholdiane e il saggio kantiano del 1786 cfr Breazeale (2010)…”