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Kantianism
Kantianism,
either the TABLE OF CONTENTS
system of
Introduction
thought
contained in the Nature and types of Kantianism

writings of the Early Kantianism: 1790–1835

epoch-making Nineteenth-century Neo-Kantianism
18th-century
Non-German Kantianism
philosopher
Assessment of Kantianism
Immanuel Kant
or those later
philosophies
that arose from the study of Kant’s writings and drew
their inspiration from his principles. Only the latter is
the concern of this article.
Immanuel Kant, print published in London,
1812.
NATURE AND TYPES OF KANTIANISM
Photos.com/Jupiterimages The Kantian movement comprises a loose
assemblage of rather diverse philosophies that share
Kant’s concern with exploring the nature, and especially the limits, of human knowledge
in the hope of raising philosophy to the level of a science in some sense similar to
mathematics and physics. Participating in the critical spirit and method of Kant, these
philosophies are thus opposed to dogmatism, to expansive speculative naturalism (such
as that of Benedict de Spinoza, the Dutch Jewish rationalist), and, usually, to irrationalism.
The various submovements of Kantianism are characterized by their sharing of certain
“family resemblances”—i.e., by the preoccupation of each with its own selection of
concerns from among the many developments of Kant’s philosophy: a concern, for
example, with the nature of empirical knowledge; with the way in which the mind
imposes its own categorial structure upon experience, and, in particular, with the nature
of the structure that renders human knowledge and moral action possible, a structure
considered to be a priori (logically independent of experience); with the status of the Ding
an sich (“thing-in-itself”), that more ultimate reality that presumably lurks behind the
apprehension of an object; or with the relationship between knowledge and morality.

A system such as the critical philosophy of Kant freely lends itself to reconstructions of its
synthesis according to whatever preferences the private philosophical inclinations of the
reader may impose or suggest. Kant’s system was a syncretism, or union, of British
empiricism (as in John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume) that stressed the role of
experience in the rise of knowledge; of the scienti c methodology of Isaac Newton; and of

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the metaphysical apriorism (or rationalism) of Christian Wolff, who systematized the
philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with its emphasis on mind. Thus, it constituted a
synthesis of elements very different in origin and nature, which tempted students to read
their own presuppositions into it.

The critical philosophy has been subjected to a variety of approaches and methods of
interpretation. These can be reduced to three fundamental types: those that conceive of
the critical philosophy as an epistemology or a pure theory of (scienti c) knowledge and
methodology, those that conceive of it as a critical theory of metaphysics or the nature of
being (ultimate reality), and those that conceive of it as a theory of normative or
valuational re ection parallel to that of ethics (in the eld of action). Each of these types—
known, respectively, as epistemological, metaphysical, and axiological Kantianism—can, in
turn, be subdivided into several secondary approaches. Historically, epistemological
Kantianism included such different attitudes as empirical Kantianism, rooted either in
physiological or psychological inquiries; the logistic Kantianism of the Marburg school,
which stressed essences and the use of logic; and the realistic Kantianism of the Austrian
Alois Riehl. Metaphysical Kantianism developed from the transcendental idealism of
German Romanticism to realism, a course followed by many speculative thinkers, who
saw in the critical philosophy the foundations of an essentially inductive metaphysics, in
accordance with the results of the modern sciences. Axiological Kantianism, concerned
with value theory, branched, rst, into an axiological approach (properly so-called), which
interpreted the methods of all three of Kant’s Critiques—Critik der reinen Vernunft (1781,
rev. ed. 1787; Critique of Pure Reason), Critik der practischen Vernunft (1788; Critique of
Practical Reason), and Critik der Urteilskraft (1790; Critique of Judgment)—as normative
disciplines of thought, and, second, into an eclectic or relativistic Kantianism, which
regarded the critical philosophy as a system of thought dependent upon social, cultural,
and historical conditions. The chief representatives of these submovements are identi ed
in the historical sections below.

It is essential to distinguish clearly between two periods within the Kantian movement:
rst, the period from 1790 to 1831 (the death of the German idealist G.W.F. Hegel) and,
second, the period from 1860 to the present—separated by a time when an
antiphilosophical positivism, a type of thought that supplanted metaphysics with science,
was predominant. The rst period began with the thorough study and emendation of
Kant’s chief theoretical work, the Critique of Pure Reason, but it soon became
intermingled with the romantic tendencies in German idealism. The second period, called
speci cally Neo-Kantianism, was rst of all a conscious reappraisal, in whole or in part, of
the theoretical Critique but was also, as a total system, a reaction against positivism.
Earlier Neo-Kantianism reduced philosophy to the theory of knowledge and scienti c
methodology; systematic Neo-Kantianism, arising at the beginning of the 20th century,
expressed itself in attempts at building metaphysical structures.

EARLY KANTIANISM: 1790–1835

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According to Kant, the Critique of Pure Reason

comprised a treatise on methodology, a preliminary
investigation prerequisite to the study of science,
which placed the Newtonian method (induction,
inference, and generalization) over against that of
Descartes and Wolff (deduction from intuitions
asserted to be self-evident). The result was a critique
of metaphysics, the value of which lay not in science
but in a realm of being accessible only to the pure
intellect. In exploring this “noumenal” realm, as he
Engraving of the solar system from Nicolaus
called it, Kant placed his Critique in a positive role.
Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium …
Recalling the revolution that occurred in astronomy
The Adler Planetarium and Astronomy
when Nicolaus Copernicus discerned, in the apparent
Museum, Chicago, Illinois
motions of the planets, re ections of the Earth’s own
motion, Kant inaugurated a Copernican revolution in
philosophy, which claimed that the subject doing the knowing constitutes, to a
considerable extent, the object—i.e., that knowledge is in part constituted by a priori or
transcendental factors (contributed by the mind itself), which the mind imposes upon the
data of experience. Far from being a description of an external reality, knowledge is, to
Kant, the product of the knowing subject. When the data are those of sense experience,
the transcendental (mental) apparatus constitutes human experience or science, or
makes it to be such.

These transcendental elements are of three different orders: at the lowest level are the
forms of space and time (technically called intuitions); above these are the categories and
principles of human intelligence, among them substance, causality, and necessity; and at
the uppermost level of abstraction are the ideas of reason—the transcendental “I,” the
world as a whole, and God. It is through the encounter between the forms of human
sensory intuition (space and time) and perceptions that phenomena are formed. The
forms arise from the subject himself; the perceptions, however—or the data of experience
—have reference, ultimately, to things-in-themselves, which nevertheless remain
unknowable, inasmuch as, in order to be known at all, it is necessary for things to appear
clothed, as it were, in the forms of human intuition and, thenceforth, to present
themselves as phenomena and not as noumena. The thing-in-itself, accordingly, indicates
the limit and not the object of knowledge.

These theses of Kant provoked criticism among the followers of Christian Wolff, the
Leibnizian rationalist, and doubts among the disciples of Kant, which, as they further
developed into systems, marked the rst period of Kantianism. Inasmuch as these
disciples took the Critique of Pure Reason to be a “preface” to the study of pure reason or
of the transcendental system and not the system itself, they saw in this interpretation an
explanation for the ambiguities to which the Critique (as they felt) was subject. Their
doubts revolved around two points: rst, Kant had erroneously distinguished three kinds
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of a priori knowledge, coordinate with the three

aforementioned levels or faculties of the mind; and
second, Kant had accepted the thing-in-itself as
constitutive of knowledge. Regarding the rst point,
they claimed that Kant had accepted the three
faculties and their respective transcendental
characteristics without investigation, in which case
this structure should be viewed, in accordance with
the preliminary character of the Critique, as a triple
manifestation of a single fundamental faculty. For this
reason the distinction between the levels of intuition
and understanding (or between the receptivity and
spontaneity of the mind) had to be rejected—for the
three transcendentals—space and time, the
Christian von Wolff, engraving by J.M.
Bernigeroth, 1755 categories, and the ideas of reason—were not
existents but were only functions of thought. Finally,
Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin
these disciples argued that the existence of a single
transcendental subject, the Ego, would render the thing-in-itself super uous and even
pernicious for the scienti c treatment of epistemology.

This function of human thought (the transcendental subject), which serves as the
absolute source of the a priori, was variously designated by different early Kantian
thinkers: for the German realist Karl L. Reinhold, it constituted the faculty of
representation; for the Lithuanian idealist Salomon Maimon, it was a mental capacity for
constructing objects; for the idealist Jakob S. Beck, a protégé of Kant, it was the act of
synthesis; for the empirical critic of Kantianism G.E. Schulze, it was experience in the sense
intended by Hume, a volley of discrete sense impressions; for the theory of knowledge of
the outstanding ethical idealist Johann G. Fichte, it was the original positing of the Ego
and the non-Ego, which meant, in turn, in the case of the aesthetic idealist F.W.J. von
Schelling, the “absolute self,” in the case of Hegel, the Geist, or “absolute Spirit,” and nally,
in the case of the pessimistic Romanticist Arthur Schopenhauer, the “absolute Will.” In
each case (excepting Schulze) the interpretation of the thing-in-itself in a realistic
metaphysical sense was rejected in favour of various degrees of transcendental idealism.
Removed from the main current of Kantianism was the empirically oriented thinker Jakob
Friedrich Fries (the one gure in this group who was not an idealist in the true sense), who
interpreted the a priori in terms of psychological faculties and elements.

Having earlier renounced these apostates on a large scale, Kant, at the end of his life,
prepared a new exposition of the transcendental philosophy (the second part of his Opus
Postumum), which showed that he was ready tacitly to accede to the criticisms of his
adversaries.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEO-KANTIANISM
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The rejection of all of philosophy by positivism had the anomalous effect of evoking an
awakening of Kantianism, for many thinkers wished to give to positivism itself a
philosophical foundation that, while respecting the phenomenological attitude, would yet
be hostile to the metaphysics of positivism, which was usually a tacit, but inconsequential,
materialism. It was justi ably held that Kant could provide such a foundation because of
his opposition to metaphysics and his limitation of scienti c knowledge to the sphere of
phenomena. The complexity of the critical philosophy was such that the theoretical
criticism could be approached in diverse ways and that, through the facts themselves,
diverse interpretations of the Critique of Pure Reason could be obtained. In the order of
their origin (though not of their worth or importance), there thus arose currents of
Kantianism that were empiricist, logicist, realist, metaphysical, axiological, and
psychological—of which the most important survived into the 20th century.

The return to Kant was determined by the historical fresco of the incomparable historian
of philosophy Kuno Fischer titled Kants Leben und die Grundlagen seiner Lehre (1860;
“Kant’s Life and the Foundations of his Teaching”), which replaced the earlier work of the
semi-Kantian Ernst Reinhold, son of the more notable Jena scholar mentioned above
(published 1828–30), and especially that of the outstanding historian of philosophy Johann
Eduard Erdmann (published 1834–53). In 1865 the imperative “Zurück nach Kant!” (“Back
to Kant!”) reverberated through the celebrated work of the young epistemologist Otto
Liebmann, Kant und die Epigonen (“Kant and his Followers”), which was destined to
extricate their spirits from the positivistic morass and, at the same time, to divert the
Germans from Romantic idealism.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL NEO-KANTIANISM
The empiricist, logistic, and realistic schools can be classed as epistemological.

Empiricist Neo-Kantianism was represented by the erudite pioneering physicist and

physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz and, in part, by Friedrich Albert Lange, author of a
famous study of materialism. Helmholtz found support in Kant for his claim, rst, that,
although perception can represent an external thing, it usually does so in a way far
removed from an actual description of its properties; second, that space and time
comprise an empirical framework created for thought by the perceiving subject; and,
third, that causality is an a priori law allowing the philosopher to infer a reality that is
absolutely unknowable. Similarly, Lange reduced science to the phenomenal level and
repudiated the thing-in-itself.

Logistic Neo-Kantianism, as represented in the most well-known and ourishing school of

Kantianism, that at Marburg, originated with Hermann Cohen, successor of Lange, who, in
Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (1871; “Kant’s Theory of Experience”), argued that the
transcendental subject is not to be regarded as a psychic being but as a logical function of
thought that constructs both the form and the content of knowledge. Nothing is
gegeben (“given”), he urged; all is aufgegeben (“propounded,” like a riddle) to thought—as

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when, in the in nitesimal calculus, the analyst generates motion by imagining thin slices
of space and time and adding up their areas. Hence, experience is a perfect construction
of humankind’s logical spirit. Cohen’s example inspired many authors, among them
Cohen’s colleague at Marburg Paul Natorp, who, in his work on the logical foundations of
the exact sciences, integrated even psychology into the Marburgian transcendentalism;
and Ernst Cassirer, best known for stressing the symbolizing capacities of human beings,
who, in his memorable work Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft
der neueren Zeit (1906–20; The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History
since Hegel), transposed this same logisticism into a form that illumines the history of
modern philosophy.

Realistic Neo-Kantianism, the third manifestation of epistemological Neo-Kantianism, was

represented in the realism of the scienti c monist Alois Riehl and of his disciple Richard
Hönigswald. Riehl held, in direct opposition to the Marburgian logisticism, that the thing-
in-itself participates positively in the constitution of knowledge inasmuch as all
perception includes a reference to things outside the subject.

METAPHYSICAL NEO-KANTIANISM
Ten years after the appearance of the aforementioned groundbreaking book Kant und die
Epigonen, its author, Otto Liebmann, introduced the new metaphysical approach in his
book Zu Analysis der Wirklichkeit (1876; “On the Analysis of Reality”), which came near to
the Kantianism of Marburg. The Romanticist Johannes Volkelt, in turn, took up the theme
of a critical metaphysics and expressed his persisting aspirations toward the Absolute in
the claim that, beyond the certainties of subjective consciousness, there exists a new kind
of certainty in a transsubjective realm. Subjectivity is, thus, inevitably transcended, just as
the sciences are surmounted when they presuppose a metaphysics. The in uential
spiritual moralist Friedrich Paulsen defended the claim that Kant had always behaved as a
metaphysician, even in the Critique of Pure Reason, in spite of the epistemological
restrictions that he imposed upon himself—a claim that made an impact that was felt
throughout the following century.

AXIOLOGICAL NEO-KANTIANISM
Inasmuch as the two principal representatives of the axiological interpretation both
taught at the University of Heidelberg, this branch is also known as the Southwest
German or Baden school. Its initiator was Wilhelm Windelband, esteemed for his
“problems” approach to the history of philosophy. The scholar who systematized this
position was his successor Heinrich Rickert, who had come from the tradition of Kuno
Fischer. Drawing a parallel between the constraints that logic exerts upon thought and
those that the sense of ought exerts upon ethical action, these thinkers argued that, while
human action must answer to an absolute value (the Good), human thought must answer
to a regulative value (the True), which imposes the duty of conforming to it. The Critique

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of Pure Reason, they held, elaborates this rule—which

is not an entity but an imperative, or absolute, charge
to act. Rickert regarded the critical endeavour as
having been too narrow, since it was suited merely to
physics. Actually, he charged, it should be the
foundation for all of the sciences of the spirit. The
distinctive characteristic of this school thus consisted
in reintegrating German idealism (as in Fichte and
Hegel) into a rather personal Kantianism.
Consequently, it succeeded in annexing more than
one area of semi-Kantian thought: e.g., “the
philosophy of the spiritual sciences” of Wilhelm

Dilthey, detail of an oil painting by R.

Dilthey, who held that intellectual life cannot be
Lepsius, c. 1904; in a private collection explained by means of naturalistic causality but only

Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin

through historical understanding (Verstehen); the
“life-philosophy” of the social philosopher Georg
Simmel, who deviated from an earlier naturalistic relativism to the espousal of objective
values; the “philosophy of value” of the experimental psychologist Hugo Münsterberg,
author of one of the earliest systems of values; the “semi-Hegelianism” of Richard Kroner,
a philosopher of culture and religion; and the general works of Bruno Bauch, Liebmann’s
successor at Jena. All of these philosophers were more or less related to axiological Neo-
Kantianism.

PSYCHOLOGICAL NEO-KANTIANISM

An initial attempt to interpret Kantian transcendentalism in psychological terms was

made by the Friesian empiricist Jürgen Bona Meyer in his Kants Psychologie (1870; “Kant’s
Psychology”). Later, a more important contribution in this eld was made by the
Göttingen philosopher of ethics and law Leonard Nelson and published in the
Abhandlungen der Fries’schen Schule (1904 ff.; “Acts of the Friesian School”). Even this title
suggests an intimate agreement with the Kantianism of Fries’s Neue Kritik der Vernunft
(1807; “New Critique of Reason”), and Nelson, indeed, is regarded as the founder of the
Neo-Friesian school. At a time when other Kantian schools were concerned with the
transcendental analysis of objective or outer knowledge, Nelson held that, in the analysis
of the subjective or inner self, the transcendental equipment of the mind—the a priori—is
directly revealed. It thus fell to psychology to lay bare this equipment, which belongs in
itself to the metaphysical order. It was upon this basis that the Marburg theologian Rudolf
Otto, in his book Das Heilige (1917; The Idea of the Holy), ventured a type of religious
phenomenology that proved very successful.

A discipline known as the Kant Philologie, concerned with the history, development, and
works of Kant, preempted a considerable portion of philosophical historiography after
1860. These studies began with the immense commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason
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produced in 1881–92 by Hans Vaihinger, known for his philosophy of the “As If” (which
stresses human reliance on pragmatic ctions), and with the founding in 1896 of the new
journal Kantstudien (“Kant Studies”) and in 1904 of the Kant-Gesellschaft (“Kant Society”)
—both still extant. The most conspicuous result of this philological movement, however,
was undeniably the monumental edition of all of Kant’s available works prepared (1900 ff.)
by the Academy of Sciences at Berlin, initially under the editorship of the champion of
humanistic studies, Wilhelm Dilthey.

NON-GERMAN KANTIANISM

The Kantian awakening, in no wise limited to Germany, extended throughout Western

philosophy. Its principal initiators were as follows: France was the rst to open to its
in uence, beginning with the eclectic thinker Victor Cousin, who had studied German
authors and made several trips to Germany. The relativistic personalist Charles Renouvier
then defended a rather personal critical philosophy, which exerted an enduring in uence
through its impact upon the extreme idealist Octave Hamelin of the Sorbonne, upon the
metaphysician and cofounder of French neospiritualism Jules Lachelier, and upon his
pupil, the philosopher of science Émile Boutroux.

The English-speaking countries, on the other hand, were not disposed to assimilate the
critical philosophy as they did Hegelian idealism. Except for the Scottish religious
absolutist Edward Caird (The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, 1889), who was chie y
a Hegelian, there was in Britain at the close of the 19th century only another Scot, the
critical realist Robert Adamson, who was a Kantian. After him, however, can be cited the
commentary, published in 1918, of Norman Kemp Smith, producer of the standard English
translation of Kant’s rst Critique, and later the remarkable exposition by the Oxford
Kantian Herbert J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience (1936). Kantian methods could
also be discerned in a later work of the prominent Oxford philosopher Peter F. Strawson,
titled Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959).

Kantianism became known in the United States

toward 1840 primarily through the New England
transcendentalist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson—
who was not, however, a Kantian himself. The
physicist and logician Charles Sanders Peirce owes his
pragmatism largely to Kant’s role as a counterweight
against Hegelianism. The American philosopher
William H. Werkmeister represented a type of Neo-
Kantianism inspired by the Marburg school (The Basis
and Structure of Knowledge, 1948).

Italian scholars, on the other hand, became vigorously

engaged in Kantian studies once the initiative was
Charles Sanders Peirce, 1891. taken by Alfonso Testa. The chief Neo-Kantian in Italy,

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Public Domain however, was the realist Carlo Cantoni, who took an
anti-positivist stance. Later, in the period from 1900 to
1918, Kantianism was represented by the extreme realism of the theist Francesco
Orestano. A school of Kantian philology formed at Turin around the erudite Christian
idealist Augusto Guzzo and his journal Filoso a. More independent in spirit was the work
of the critical ontologist Pantaleo Carabellese, Giovanni Gentile’s successor at Rome.

ASSESSMENT OF KANTIANISM

PROBLEMS OF KANTIANISM

As far as epistemology is concerned, the critical

philosophy constitutes a theory of science that agrees
with current trends, for science must have a base that is
empirical though also real. On the other hand, the
transcendental or a priori is implicated, and severe
complications ensue whenever the question is posed
whether a type of apprehension can be acquired apart
from experience that conveys, however, some new and
genuine knowledge—whether, in short, synthetic a
priori judgments can be made. Signi cantly, the
founder of phenomenology, the German philosopher
Edmund Husserl, came back to the fold of Kantian

Edmund Husserl, c. 1930.

transcendentalism after previously opposing it bitterly.
As against the Kantian position, traditional empiricism
Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin
entirely rejects the possibility (and even the meaning) of
the synthetic a priori. The pioneering philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein imposed upon philosophy the obligation to limit reason (or the
transcendental element in knowledge)—a semi-Kantian position, which he nonetheless
later renounced. As for existentialism, one of Germany’s foremost philosophers, Martin
Heidegger, presented in his Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929; Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics) a highly personalized interpretation.

A student of Cohen at Marburg, the metaphysician Nicolai Hartmann, became the

harbinger of the realistic approach, elaborating in his Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der
Erkenntniss (1921; “Outline of a Metaphysics of Knowledge”) on an ontological relation that
he discerned to obtain between two forms of being: thought and reality. Accordingly, the
principles of thought correspond, in his view, to those of reality—a position at odds with
Kant (even when he is interpreted as a realist). Moreover, Hartmann treated the problems
of mathematics in a manner that was again completely opposed to Kant; in particular, he
questioned the validity of Kant’s a priori intuition (or positing) of the spatio-temporal
framework in terms of which humans think about the world, challenging Kant at this
point not merely to accommodate the non-Euclidean geometries (with curved space)

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that afforded a realist alternative to the a priori but above all to re ect the distinctly
logistic position regarding the foundations of mathematics to which he adhered.

Although discussion of the status of the thing-in-itself in human knowledge of the real
remained on the philosophical agenda both during and after Hartmann’s time, it invoked
the same indecision as it always had. At a time when Hartmann was accepting the thing-
in-itself almost naïvely, empiricism (in all its forms) rejected it categorically and attempted
to construe the real in terms merely of what Kant had called phenomena. In the realm of
ethics, phenomenologists and existentialists were dissatis ed with the purely formal
character of Kant’s ethics—i.e., with its lack of speci city—and substituted a “material”
ethic, of concrete duties, which was no less absolute than that of Kant. Meanwhile, logical
empiricists (or logical positivists) were interested only in the analysis of expressions of
moral judgment, which they reduced to imperative statements that are emotive and
aimed at winning adherents.

OBJECTIONS TO KANTIANISM
It must be acknowledged that Kant has furnished many of the most signi cant themes
that are found in the currents of contemporary philosophy, even in the forms that they
still assume today. Yet, as compared with the state of affairs that existed from 1860 to 1918,
Kantianism suffered an impressive decline that continued until approximately the third
quarter of the 20th century.

What were the reasons for this decline? In general, after World War I the reduction of
philosophy to the philosophy of science was no longer accepted, though logical
empiricism offered hardly any objection to it. The philosophy of science comprises, in fact,
only one problem area, not the entire assemblage of philosophical problems. From this a
second objection arose: Kantianism in general is too formalistic to satisfy human
inquisitiveness, which inclines more and more toward concrete concerns. Kantianism
restricts itself to examining the a priori forms of thought and cares little for its diverse
contents. Were this objection pertinent only to the exact sciences, it would not be serious,
for these sciences attend to their own applications, but the objection becomes very grave
for the eld of ethics. For this reason, the objection against Kant’s formalism has been
raised most passionately against his ethical treatise, the Critique of Practical Reason—as
by Hartmann, by the phenomenologist Max Scheler, and by others. This transcendental
formalism immediately encounters the further objection of subjectivism—in spite of
efforts (from the side of logic) to evade it—i.e., it is blamed for obstructing the
apprehension of the real universality of the Ego, of the thinking subject, and for inexorably
impelling the scholar to the view that human knowledge is merely the product of
subjective construction. This subjectivistic transcendentalism, by its intrinsic logic, denies
humans access to the external world. Not only does it debar them from the world of
things-in-themselves but it also prevents them from granting objective reality to

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phenomena as such, inasmuch as the transcendental source is here viewed as playing a

constructive role with respect to experience and the phenomenon.

These three major objections, which stand out in the midst of many criticisms of minor
details, recur constantly in the Kantian literature. The result of these objections, as far as
the evaluation of the critical philosophy is concerned, is that it is repudiated by some
philosophers in its entirety—without, however, being thereby considered barred by
limitation. Kant thus remains, in spite of everything, an inexhaustible source of problems
and ideas, comparable in this respect to Plato and Aristotle, with whom he forms the
great triad of Western philosophical thought.

Herman Jean de Vleeschauwer

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