Answering aenesidemus: Schulze's attack on Reinholdian representationalism and its importance for Fichte

The importance of Gottlob Ernst Schulze's Aenesidemus 1 for the history of German Idealism has been widely recognized. Much as Hume had awoken Kant, Aenesidemus jolted the young Fichte out of his slumbering adherence to Reinhold's formulation of Kant's philosophy, leading him to re-evaluate the claims, methods, and foundations of the Critical philosophy. In his "Review of the Aenesidemus" 2 Fichte set out the results of this re-evaluation, which included his doctrine of intellectual intuition with remarkable and uncharacteristic clarity. 3 According to a widely accepted story about the genesis of Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre, the early Fichte was largely sympathetic to ..