Spontaneity before the Critical Turn: The Spontaneity of the Mind in Crusius, the Pre-Critical Kant, and Tetens

The introduction of a spontaneity proper to the understanding in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft is often thought to be one of the central innovations of Kant's Critical philosophy. Yet a number of thinkers within the eighteenth-century German tradition in the time before the KrV had already dev...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of the history of philosophy Vol. 54; no. 4; pp. 625 - 648
Main Author Dyck, Corey W
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.10.2016
Subjects
18th century
Cognition & reasoning
German
Language history
Philosophy
Tradition
Traditions
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:The introduction of a spontaneity proper to the understanding in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft is often thought to be one of the central innovations of Kant's Critical philosophy. Yet a number of thinkers within the eighteenth-century German tradition in the time before the KrV had already developed a robust conception of the spontaneity of the mind. In this paper, I consider three influential accounts of the spontaneity of the mind-those of Crusius, the pre-Critical Kant, and Tetens-which, while distinct, nonetheless relate to and explicitly draw upon one another in important ways, forming the interconnected and, thus far, largely overlooked pre-Critical context for Kant's discussion of the spontaneity of the understanding.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
ISSN:0022-5053
1538-4586
1538-4586
DOI:10.1353/hph.2016.0073