Kant’s Legacy in the «aetas kantiana». The Search for a New Principle in Reinhold and Fichte

The paper explores Reinhold’s and Fichte’s projects to transform philosophy into a «rigorous science», focusing on the different strategies they employ to make Kant’s thought a genuine system of philosophy. Particular attention is paid to the manner in which Reinhold and Fichte conceive of their foundation project. In the first case as an Elementarphilosophie, as an expression of Reinhold’s typically enlightened conception of philosophy; however, being his project still heavily indebted to the legacy of the Cartesian and Wolffian models of foundation it turns out to be inevitably inclined to misunderstand Kant’s idea of philosophy as science. In the case of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre the foundation is conceived on the basis of the ‘practical’ subjectivity i.e., freedom, now understood far from Kant’s idea in a strong metaphysical sense, as the spontaneous character of reason and as the very original principle.