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Portrait of Philosopher David Hume

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, was largely ignored upon initial publication due to its difficulty and length. It received few reviews and no significance was granted to it. While previously praised for shorter, more readable works, the Critique was a "tough nut to crack" obscured by its "heavy gossamer" style, according to one critic. To clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783. His reputation gradually rose in the 1780s through other important works, but was ultimately boosted unexpectedly through Reinhold's 1786 letters framing Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era

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56 views1 page

Portrait of Philosopher David Hume

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, was largely ignored upon initial publication due to its difficulty and length. It received few reviews and no significance was granted to it. While previously praised for shorter, more readable works, the Critique was a "tough nut to crack" obscured by its "heavy gossamer" style, according to one critic. To clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783. His reputation gradually rose in the 1780s through other important works, but was ultimately boosted unexpectedly through Reinhold's 1786 letters framing Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era

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Reo28
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by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience.

[76] He drew
a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori
('beforehand'), and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality.[b] He acquiesced to
Hume somewhat by defining causality as a "regular, constant sequence of events in time, and nothing
more."[79]

Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this
Critique was largely ignored upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the
original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. It
received few reviews, and these granted it no significance. Kant's
former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing
reason as an entity worthy of criticism instead of considering the
process of reasoning within the context of language and one's
entire personality.[80] Similar to Christian Garve and Johann
Georg Heinrich Feder, he rejected Kant's position that space and
time possessed a form that could be analyzed. Additionally, Garve
and Feder also faulted Kant's Critique for not explaining
differences in perception of sensations.[81] Its density made it, as
Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to
crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer".[82] Its reception
stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier
works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded the
first Critique. These well-received and readable tracts include one
Portrait of philosopher David Hume
on the earthquake in Lisbon that was so popular that it was sold by
the page.[83] Prior to the change in course documented in the first
Critique, his books had sold well.[74] Kant was disappointed with
the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the
Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter,
Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805) (professor of mathematics) published
Erläuterungen über des Herrn Professor Kant Critik der reinen Vernunft (Königsberg, 1784), which
was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of
important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786,
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected
source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In
these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of
the era: the Pantheism Dispute. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount
to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, leading to a bitter public
dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the
Enlightenment and the value of reason.

Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by
defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the
most famous philosopher of his era.

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