Abstract

August Ludwig Hülsen’s virtually forgotten “Prüfung der von der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin aufgestellten Preisfrage: Was hat die Metaphysik seit Leibniz und Wolf für Progressen gemacht?” is the first German post-Kantian system in which reason is conceived as developing in history according to speculative rule based on the logical resolving of contradictions. Notwithstanding, Hülsen’s system is up to this day almost entirely unknown to most scholars in the field. This paper outlines the fundamental aspects of Hülsen’s system and discusses two of its main innovations: the deduction of the transcendental possibility of rational historicity, and the systematic historization of Fichte’s concept of judging activity; the constitutive equivalent of consciousness’s logical-temporal substrate