In response to David Hume's skeptical challenge, Kant through his “Critical Philosophy” changed the axis of the “doctrine of knowledge”, from external reality, to the “conditions of possibility for experience”. He uses this conceptual element in order to constitute an idea of objectivity that is more advanced than previous “metaphysical rationalism”, especially related to the notion of “representation”. As a result, the apprehended phenomenon corresponds to the object of critical knowledge and the thing-in-itself, given as external to cognition, is taken as unknowable. But with this, the subsequent philosophical scene was left to ask itself: since the data of cognition are “mental phenomena” (and through them, the conditions of possibility of the subject) the domain proper to knowledge, how can it be certain of corresponding to the object and satisfy the demand for scientific knowledge? From this problematic nexus Reinhold, Fichte and others searched to expose the scientific character of philosophical knowledge, based on the contributions of Kant's critical project, as others tried to, once and for all, dissuade philosophy from the idea of manifesting itself as science.
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