Abstract

Kant’s synthesis of empiricism and rationalism is often considered to be one of his most important contributions to philosophy. In this article I investigate the reception of this synthesis in the late 1780s and early 1790s. I show that during this early reception Kant’s attempt at a synthesis, and its empiricist side in particular, proved to be a failure when it was confronted with a powerful challenge from the side of Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Salomon Maimon and Karl Leonhard Reinhold. This failure, I argue, resulted in a break within the Kantian movement itself between a rationalist and an empiricist Kantianism.