Marialena Karampatsou

According to an increasingly dominant interpretation of Kant, empirical laws are grounded in causal powers exercised by things, in accordance with their (essential) natures. By emphasizing the natures of things, such an interpretation is in principle amenable to a comparatively realist–– within the constraints of a Kantian framework––approach, which views Kantian things in themselves, i.e., the mind-independent world, as the (ultimate) ground of empirical laws. In this paper ––to appear in the edited collection "Laws and Powers in the Metaphysics of Science: Historical and Scientific Themes", Routledge, eds.: Vanessa Seifert, Stathis Psillos, Stavros Ioannidis––, I formulate a number of positive considerations, and touch upon a (major) challenge, in the spirit of explicitly defending a comparatively realist, “noumenal” version of this type of reading of Kant.

The Kantian thing in itself has been the subject of a centuries-old debate, toward which Salomon Maimon––following the standard interpretation––is thought to make the first “forward-looking” move: Maimon is interpreted as the first proponent of the redundance of a commitment to the mind-independent world, thus inaugurating a new era in the reception of Kant’s idealism. Against this influential narrative, I argue that Maimon’s views are motivated by a combination of skepticism and explanatory rationalism, which is fully compatible with realism and does not entail the dispensability of the mind-independent world. This has interesting and important implications for Maimon’s overall reading of Kant and for his place in the history of German philosophy.

This monograph, published (in German) as vol. 150 of the “Quellen und Studien zur Philosophie” De Gruyter series, is a revised version of my dissertation. It is focused on Kant’s transcendental idealism and the early, pre-Fichtean criticism thereof. It takes up the problem of the thing in itself in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and analyzes the most influential criticisms by Kant’s very first readers (J. G. Feder, C. Garve, F. H. Jacobi, H. A. Pistorius, J. A. Eberhard, G. E. Schulze, and S. Maimon), who challenged the coherence and plausibility of Kant’s overall idealist conception. In reconstructing and discussing these early reactions to Kant’s idealism, I analyze and assess their criticism against the background of new scholarship on transcendental idealism. (Since 2024, it is also available as a paperback.)

On the historically dominant reading of the Fourth Paralogism, Kant pursues an antiskeptical strategy of a Berkeleyan stripe, aiming to secure our belief in the existence of the external world by reducing this world to a mind-dependent, mental entity. I propose a more charitable and realist interpretation of Kant’s strategy. On the proposed reading, Kant pursues a moderate antiskeptical strategy which sets radical skeptical worries aside; Kant’s Berkeleyan-sounding remarks merely express standard Kantian doctrine (his theory of space).

A revised version of my dissertation has appeared under the title "Der Streit um das Ding an sich: Systematische Analysen zur Rezeption des kantischen Idealismus 1781–1794" (de Gruyter, vol. 150 “Quellen und Studien zur Philosophie” series). My dissertation is focused on Kant’s transcendental idealism and the early, pre-Fichtean criticism thereof. It takes up the problem of the thing in itself in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and analyzes the most influential criticisms by Kant’s very first readers (J. G. Feder, C. Garve, F. H. Jacobi, H. A. Pistorius, J. A. Eberhard, G. E. Schulze, and S. Maimon), who challenged the coherence and plausibility of Kant’s overall idealist conception. In reconstructing and discussing these early reactions to Kant’s idealism, I analyze and assess their criticism against the background of new scholarship on transcendental idealism, pursuing two central goals: (i) I defend Kant’s idealism –– and in particular, the status of the Kantian thing in itself –– against these early critics; (ii) nonetheless, I argue that by engaging with their texts, there are valuable lessons to be learnt which can and should inform our contemporary understanding of Kant. Consequently, the claims and arguments of this thesis have implications for both contemporary Kant scholarship, as well as research on the reception of Kant and/or the origins of German Idealism. With respect to Kant scholarship, I do not regard the endorsement of one-world readings of Kant’s idealism as an indispensable move for a defense of Kant against his early critics; the interpretive and argumentative strategies I develop are mostly neutral with respect to the debate between one- and two-world readings. From the perspective of research on the reception of Kant and/or the origins of German Idealism, my dissertation goes against a widespread tendency within the historiography of German philosophy: the tendency to distinguish between “conservative”, “backward-looking” early critics of Kant on the one hand, and more “progressive”, “forward-looking” ones –– who pave the way for German Idealism –– on the other hand. I argue instead that Kant’s pre-Fichtean readers form a far more homogeneous group than is often thought: rather than considering their arguments in isolation, where they can easily be overlooked philosophically, placing them in context with one another helps us better appreciate the interesting philosophical points they contain. .