As of late, I’ve been working my way through a number of German idealist thinkers, producing a series of small posts as I investigate the tradition (see on Kant and Fichte here, on Fichte and Schelling here, and on Goethe here). In this post, I move back to Kant himself, sketching an outline of the critical philosophy, as expressed in The Critique of Pure Reason, including an account of his rejection of rationalism and empiricism, his account of intuitions, concepts, and ideas, and his notions of judgment, imagination, and apperception. Understanding Kant’s critical philosophy is essential to understanding the evolution of German idealism as a whole. As Frederick Beiser notes, those involved in this tradition strove to find a middle path between a number of competing binaries, including that between skeptical subjectivism and naive realism, foundationalism and relativism, materialism and idealism, and Platonism and historicism, binaries which, as Beiser rightly suggests, are still the concern of much contemporary epistemology.[1]  Continue reading