The aim of this essay is to investigate various attempts at possible answers regarding the question of what is real. The basic assumption is that Kant had provided a philosophical theory of a kind such that it allows this question to be answered in a novel way. In order to show that, the philosophical conceptions of his predecessors are investigated: the metaphysical concept of A. G. Baumgarten on the one hand, the empirical concept of D. Hume on the other. The (...) main result of the investigation is that, according to Kant, we can take something to be real only insofar as it is in a relationship to ourselves. (shrink)

The paper advocates the view that within Kant’s project of transcendental philosophy, the metaphysical problem of the relation between body and soul is reduced to an epistemic problem. The paper also aims to demonstrate the particular implications of this reduction with regard to the issues addressed in metaphysical conceptions of the relation between body and mind. Further, it is shown what conception of matter Kant develops within his reduction.

The aim of the „Grundriss des Eigentümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre“ is to analyse the theoretical faculty. The starting point of this analysis is the proposition that the I posits itself as determinated by the Non-I. My thesis, which can be proven in Fichte´s text, is that it is the notion of the picture which serves as a point of orientation in the analysis of the cognitive faculty, as Kant calls it. The cognition of an object comes about as a dialectical relationship (...) between the picturing i, the picture and the pictured object, which Fichte calls the real thing. I would like to investigate how much Fichte follows the Kantian analysis of the cognitive faculty on the one hand and how much he differs from it on the other hand. This investigation will take into account a question which is very important for every epistemology taking its starting point in subjectivity, namely the question of how the i can recognize that the objects of its cognition are real things and not the products of his phantasy. Fichte explicitly raises this very question. At the end of this paper, I attempt to show what kind of answer Fichte gives to this questionee. (shrink)

The author of this paper focuses on an interpretation of Kant’s conception of the history of metaphysics as being a history of pure reason. Kant develops this conception both in the Critique of Pure Reason and in a later work in response to a question commissioned by the Royal Academy of Sciences: What advances has metaphysics made in Germany since the time of Leibniz and Wolff? Key passages in these writings will be given analytical attention. It will thus be shown (...) that Kant’s purpose was not to eliminate metaphysics, but to correct it, and especially in his work On the Progress of Metaphysics, the philosopher from Königsberg points out the importance of skepticism within the history of metaphysics. (shrink)

[The category of substance and the categorical form. of judgement].

Kant treats the problem of a philosophical theory of God in two basic steps. First he develops his own understanding of the notion of God by providing the doctrine of the transcendental ideal. Then he proceeds to a critique of three types of the proof of God’s existence. Thus, Kant’s „deconstruction“ of philosophical theology has a positive and a negative part. The present contribution analyses the positive part only, with the aim to supply a detailed reconstruction of Kant’s procedure here. (...) The reconstruction proceeds in the following steps. First we have to elucidate Kant’s notion of ideal. Following Wolff’s differentiation of the three kinds of special metaphysics, Kant distinguishes three basic types of those notions of pure reason which, in an explicit reference to Plato, he names „ideas“. It must then be explained why Kant calls the theological idea, unlike the psychological and the cosmological ones, an ideal. My claim is that the difficulty of the chapter on the transcendental ideal derives from the fact that Kant, without adverting to it explicitly yet in accordance with his own methodology, develops one by one three alternative suggestions of how the notion of the transcendental ideal can be approached. These three suggestions are then investigated in three sections where I also attempt to answer the question as to why Kant defines the theological idea to be not only an ideal but also a transcendental one. In conclusion, I provide a reconstruction of Kantʼs explanation of the origin of the notion of the transcendental ideal in pure reason. (shrink)

In my essay I try to show, how in his reaction to Schulze’s sceptical critique of Reinhold’s philosophy Fichte attempted to achieve the basic premisses of his own program of Wissenschaftslehre. In dem Beitrag wird gezeigt, auf welche Weise Fichte in der Auseinandersetzung mit der skeptischen Herausforderung, die Schulzes Kritik der Reinholdschen Elementarphilosophie darstellte, versuchte, sein eigenes Programm der Wissenschaftslehre in seinen grundsätzlichen Prämissen zu profilieren.