Volume 40, Issue 1/2, Spring/Summer 2010
Scott Stapleford
Pages 139-146
A Refutation of Idealism from 1777
The paper identifies a possible precedent for Kant’s Refutation of Idealism in the work of Johann Nicolaus Tetens. An attempt is made to reconstruct the reasoning that led Tetens to reject idealism as a false starting point, and some parallels are drawn between Tetens’s psychologistic approach to the problem and
Kant’s transcendental methodology.