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Publication

Reinhold's Methodological Foundationalism: The Pursuit of Certainty in the Elementarphilosophie, Rational Realism, and Philosophy of Language

Book - Dissertation

Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757-1823) was an influential thinker during the period of early post-Kantian philosophy. Yet his work remains overshadowed by giants such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, whose growth he contributed to. What little attention Reinhold has received focuses on his method, and almost exclusively on the first phase of his thought. The goal of my project, by contrast, is to shed light on Reinhold's evolving conception of knowledge over the course of his three mature and methodologically diverse phases. These phases, I argue, share one common goal: achieving knowledge or scientific certainty. Reinhold's first phase, the Elementarphilosophie, is deeply indebted to Kant's critical philosophy. Accordingly, he rejects the possibility of unconditioned knowledge, or knowledge of the thing in itself, and accepts the method of investigating the thinking subject in order to delineate the scope of scientific certainty. Despite these commitments, Reinhold argues that Kant's method does not achieve scientific certainty. Accomplishing just that becomes his goal. Continuing his investigation of the thinking subject, Reinhold rethinks the status of logic in his second phase, "rational realism", and argues that in it he achieves unconditioned knowledge. In Reinhold's final phase, which deals with philosophy of language, he comes full circle to a new form of conditioned knowledge, that is, knowledge conditioned through language.
Publication year:2019
Accessibility:Open