THE THEME

Kant is the most important figure in this book, as one would expect in a work that deals with late-eighteenth-century German philosophy. He is not, however, the only or even its main object of interest. As a matter of fact, Fichte will end up occupying just as much space as Kant. The main object of interest lies, however, in neither of these two philosophers but at the intersection of two themes too broad to consider on their own. One has to do with the reception of Kant between the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and Fichte's publication of The Vocation of Humankind in 1800 – in the period, that is, when transcendental idealism was being transformed either into what eventually came to be known as ‘post-Kantian idealism’ or into that kind of typically German form of scientific as well as religious positivism that took hold of the German philosophy faculties in the nineteenth century. The philosophy of Jakob Friedrich Fries can be cited as a splendid example of this kind of positivism.