Karl Leonhard Reinhold facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Karl Leonhard Reinhold
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Reinhold by Peter Copmann, 1820
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| Born | 26 October 1757 |
| Died | 10 April 1823 (aged 65) |
| Education | Jesuitenkollegium St. Anna (1772–1773) Barnabitenkollegium St. Michael (1773–1778) University of Leipzig (1784; no degree) |
| Era | 18th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Austrian Enlightenment German idealism |
| Institutions | Barnabitenkollegium St. Michael (1778–1783) University of Jena (1787–1794) University of Kiel (1794–1823) |
| Academic advisors | Immanuel Kant (epistolary correspondent) |
| Notable students | Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg |
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Main interests
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Epistemology, ethics |
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Notable ideas
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Elementary philosophy (Elementarphilosophie), principle of consciousness (Satz des Bewußtseins) |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Karl Leonhard Reinhold (born October 26, 1757 – died April 10, 1823) was an Austrian philosopher. He became famous for helping people understand the ideas of Immanuel Kant in the late 1700s. Reinhold developed his own "elementary philosophy," which was a way of thinking based on a main idea about how we are conscious. This philosophy also influenced other important German thinkers like Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
Karl was the father of Ernst Christian Gottlieb Reinhold (1793–1855), who also became a philosopher.
Contents
Life and Work
Reinhold was born in Vienna, Austria. When he was 14, in 1772, he joined a Jesuit college, which was a type of religious school. He studied there for a year. After the Jesuit order was stopped in 1773, he joined another Catholic college in Vienna. In 1778, he became a teacher at this college. He became a priest in 1780.
However, Reinhold did not feel comfortable with the strict life of a monk. So, in 1783, he left the college and moved to Leipzig. There, he changed his religion to Protestantism.
Starting a New Path
In 1784, after studying philosophy for a short time in Leipzig, Reinhold moved to Weimar. He started working with Christoph Martin Wieland on a famous German magazine called Der Teutsche Merkur (The German Mercury). Later, Reinhold married Wieland's daughter, Sophia Catharina Susanna Wieland, in 1785.
While working at the magazine, Reinhold wrote a series of articles called Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (Letters on the Kantian Philosophy). These articles were published between 1786 and 1787. They were very important because they helped many more people learn about the ideas of Immanuel Kant, who was a very complex philosopher. Because of these popular "Letters," Reinhold was invited to teach at the University of Jena. He taught there from 1787 to 1794.
In 1789, Reinhold published his most important book, Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (Essay towards a New Theory of the Faculty of Representation). In this book, he tried to make Kant's ideas simpler and connect them to one main principle. He called this his "principle of consciousness." In 1794, he moved to the University of Kiel, where he taught until he died in 1823.
Later in his life, Reinhold was influenced by other philosophers like J. G. Fichte. However, his most important contributions came from his earlier work, especially his efforts to explain and simplify Kant's philosophy. His way of developing Kant's ideas was called Elementarphilosophie (Elementary Philosophy).
Understanding Kant's Philosophy
Making Kant's Ideas Clear
Karl Leonhard Reinhold had been a Catholic priest, and he believed strongly in Christian morality and the importance of each person. He thought that Kant's philosophy could offer a way to understand God, free will, and life after death, without relying only on religious beliefs or falling into doubt.
However, Kant's main book, Critique of Pure Reason, was very difficult to read and understand. Not many people read it, and it didn't have much influence at first. Reinhold decided to write about it in The German Mercury magazine. He found a clever way to explain it: he suggested reading the book backward, starting from the end. The last part of Kant's book talked about morality and its connection to ideas like God and free will. These were the topics Reinhold cared about most. By focusing on these parts, Reinhold made Kant's work much more interesting and accessible to the public. Because of Reinhold's efforts, Kant's Critique quickly became a very important book.
Many famous philosophers, like Fichte, Hegel, and Friedrich Schiller, developed their own ideas by reacting to Reinhold's way of understanding Kant. Reinhold believed that people should always try to be good, not just to get a reward later. He also thought that philosophies and religions should be judged by how well they meet the needs of people in different times. He saw philosophy as constantly developing, with new ideas always struggling to become known.
Building a Strong Base for Kant
Professor George di Giovanni explains that Reinhold tried to give Kant's philosophy a stronger foundation. Reinhold thought there were two levels of philosophy. The first, most basic level, was about how our minds are conscious and how we form ideas. The second level was about what we can know or want.
Kant realized that we could understand how our minds work. But Reinhold felt that Kant focused too much on the objects we know, rather than on the basic process of how our minds become aware of things. Reinhold believed that Kant should have looked more closely at the fundamental fact of consciousness itself.
Reinhold's book, Essay towards a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation, describes the main parts of consciousness. In this book, he focused on how we know things, rather than just on moral issues.
- How We Form Ideas
* There are things that exist outside our minds (called "things-in-themselves"), but we can never truly know them directly. * Human knowledge is limited to how things appear to us, not how they are in themselves. * Reinhold's Principle of Consciousness: When we are conscious, our mind separates the idea or mental image from both the person observing and the object being observed. * This separation is a basic fact of how our minds work. * The person observing is where the idea or mental image exists. * The observed object is anything that our mind sees as being present.
Reinhold looked at what must be true for us to have an idea of something, like having a subject (the observer) and an object (what is observed).
- What Ideas Are Made Of
* The "material" of an idea comes from our senses. This material is put together when we connect it to an object. This helps us tell the difference between something "in itself" and our idea of it. * The "form" of an idea is how our mind actively organizes and unifies what we sense. This helps us tell the difference between our "self-in-itself" and our idea of it. * We have to assume that a "self-in-itself" and a "thing-in-itself" exist. This helps our mind tell the difference between our own consciousness and the object we are thinking about.
- We can never know anything exactly as it is, without it being an idea in our mind. An object or a subject "in itself" cannot be known because it doesn't have the "material" or "form" that our minds use to understand things. Only what is represented in our minds can be known.
- Our consciousness must always contain ideas.
* An everyday idea gets its "material" from something that seems to be outside of us. * A "pure" idea gets its "material" by thinking about consciousness itself. * When we clearly and distinctly know an object, it means we are aware that our consciousness is creating an idea of an external object within our mind.
- How We Gain Knowledge
* Knowledge is a clear and distinct awareness that our consciousness contains an idea of an object. * Knowledge means our consciousness knows that its own content is an idea of an object, created by a subject.
Works in English Translation
- Essay on a New Theory of the Human Capacity for Representation, Berlin-Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2011. ISBN: 978-3110227406
- Karl Ameriks (ed.), Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN: 978-0521830232
See also
In Spanish: Karl Leonhard Reinhold para niños
- Aenesidemus
