Abstract
Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823) is hailed as one of the most influential thinkers of early post-Kantian philosophy. He is best known for popularising critical philosophy through his Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, first published in the Teutsche Merkur (1786), and for restructuring it into a kind of axiomatic-deductive system in the Elementarphilosophie (1789–1794). An axiomatic-deductive system is based on one or several self-evident principles from which all subsequent principles are deduced. Reinhold’s restructuring of Kant’s critical project was highly influential for Fichte and the early Schelling, and thus, for the transition from Kantian critical philosophy to German Idealism. Most Reinhold scholars interpret the system of the Elementarphilosophie as belonging to the pre-critical tradition. Counter to this view, I consider the possibility that Reinhold was influenced by the idea of a philosophical system put forth by Kant in the Architectonic. I proceed by first discussing Kant’s criteria of both a pre-critical and a critical system, before assessing which the Elementarphilosophie can best be described as. I conclude that although Reinhold’s system is more adequately classified as a critical than as a pre-critical system, it must ultimately be viewed as something new.
© 2016 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
