Chapter 8: Transcendental Philosophy Summary and Analysis

Kant's philosophy has had an undeniable impact on all philosophy that has come after it. The most famous philosophers who followed in his theoretical footsteps were Fichte, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. Fichte took the distinction between phenomena and noumena to justify a radical subjective idealism that Kant was an explicit opponent of. Schopenhauer, too, interpreted Kant as an idealist and his philosophy, which presaged existentialism in many ways, took for granted the unreality of perception. Hegel took what one might consider the most extravagant interpretation of Kant. He read the "Critique of Pure Reason" not as an attempt to dethrone naked logic, but rather to show how reason builds through a perpetual process of self-destruction. Each attempt to reach the world as it is ultimately fails, but in each failure there is another step towards the truth. This...