Sommer, David; (2024) Form and Matter in Early German Idealism. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The thesis traces the development of the form/matter distinction from Kant’s first Critique to Fichte’s early Wissenschaftslehre. My aim is to exhibit and estimate its crucial role in the different attempts of post-Kantian philosophers to create a foundationalist system of transcendental idealism. The treatment of the original Kantian dichotomy, and its significance for the development of the different forms of transcendental idealism proposed by Reinhold, Maimon, and Fichte, is divided into four chapters. The first concerns Kant’s use of the form/matter dichotomy in the First Critique, focussing on its importance for the doctrine of faculty dualism. The second chapter examines Reinhold’s use of form and matter in the first two presentations of his Elementarphilosophie as well as Schulze’s criticisms in Aenesidemus. The third chapter concerns Maimon, and argues that his construal of the quid juris? as an antinomy between form and matter is central to his transformation of transcendental philosophy. Maimon diagnoses in transcendental idealism a universal antinomy of thought, arising from the relation between form and matter, and claims that this antinomy is irresolvable under the assumption of faculty dualism. In the fourth chapter, I examine the development of Fichte’s early Wissenschaftslehre from his first private notes on Reinhold to the Grundlage of 1794-95, again with a focus on the role of the form/matter distinction. I argue that the main changes in Fichte’s conception of method and system over this period arise from his different attempts to meet the formal and material constraints to which a foundationalist philosophical system is subject – a challenge to which he is alerted by Schulze and Maimon in the face of his own commitment to Reinhold’s conception of formal and material criteria. This leads to different problems and conceptions of method within the Grundlage. The topic has not previously been treated in similarly direct, fine-grained, and comprehensive terms. I take the thesis to have exposed a fundamental and crucial unifying dynamic in the post-Kantian development, crucial for our understanding of the moves made by Kant's immediate successors.

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