Research unit


The first critical reception of Kant’s legacy

Beyond Kant, there is a growing interest in the first critical reception of Kant’s legacy, thanks to the post-doc research of Emiliano Acosta and Henk Vandaele that respectively work on radical enlightenment and on the topical notion of truth inspired by Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre of 1794. Pursuing the question of objectivity in the context of perception, Liesbet De Kock studies the inspiration von Helmholtz found in Fichte’s metaphysical and epistemological theory of I and not-I, and uses precisely this philosophical background to critically assess current, mainly enactivist, theories of perception. Hegel’s work has been the major source of inspiration for Eli Noé, who seeks to evaluate Hegel’s claims on language in relation to Kant’s transcendental philosophy from the vantage point of what could be considered as the “missing link” between the two: the linguistic “metacritique” of Hamann and Herder.