Putting Doubt in its Place: Karl Leonhard Reinhold on the Relationship between Philosophical Skepticism and Transcendental Idealism

Abstract

Though sometimes dismissed as an unfortunate relapse into dogmatic slumber following a brief moment of Critical lucidity and reviled for its alleged epistemological unscrupulousness, post-Kantian idealism was, to a significant degree, a direct response to late eighteenth-century skepticism. The complete story of the historical relationship between philosophical skepticism and transcendental idealism is long and complex. Here, however, we shall be concerned only with one early and neglected chapter of the same: namely, with K.L. Reinhold’s attempt to assign skepticism a particular function and place in the historical development of modern philosophy and to interpret Kant’s Critical philosophy, as well as his own subsequent efforts to produce a systematically revised system of transcendental idealism, in this same historical perspective.