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One way to characterize Kant's legacy to German Idealism would be to say that it is the respectability of the project of idealism itself. The early eighteenth-century idealism or "immaterialism" of George Berkeley and Arthur Collier¹ had hardly made idealism a respectable position in their time. But when Kant promulgated his "transcendental idealism" in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason , in 1781, having anticipated it in his inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World of 1770, he put idealism at the center of philosophical discussion in Germany for the next fifty years, to the death of Hegel in 1831, or beyond. Indeed, it could well be argued that Kant made some form of idealism a central issue and viable position in philosophy well into the twentieth century, not only in German Neo-Kantianism, but in British and American Neo-Hegelianism and their parallels in French and Italian philosophy and beyond. To be sure, Kant immediately had to struggle to distinguish his transcendental idealism from the scorned idealism of Berkeley and his few fellows, and no one except Kant's epigones adopted his form of idealism without significant modification. But without Kant, it could hardly be imagined that such philosophers as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer would have had significant philosophical careers at all, let alone that they would have tried to express what they had to say as some form of idealism.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_3

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