Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Re-Organisation of Philosophy: An Address, Delivered Before the Aristotelian Society, November 8, 1886 (Being the Annual Presidential Address for the Eighth Session of the Society)
I begin with a somewhat bold assumption, consider ing the backward state of philosophical opinion in this country; I begin with the assumption, that the Kantian Era in philosophy is at an end. It has tailed of into Erkenntnisstlwo?e again, with which under Kant it began. You know what is meant by Kant's Copernicanism in philosophy. It consisted in his redressing the equipoise of the system, removing so to speak its centre of gravity, or central source of explanation, and placing it in the Subject, instead of in the Objective world. He began by putting that question which is the great question of Er/cenntnisstheo?e, - How is experience possible? - mean ing by experience the experience of ordinary life and the experience of science, E'rlcenntniss, which is but a more exact and reasoned version of the former. And his answer was, that experience is possible only on the supposition of a Subject existing as a real agent, with a real constitution of its own, and that the world which was the object of this experience existed only so far as the Subject made it by experiencing it.
Kant originally intended, by the Subject, the finite individual Subject, that is to say the multitudinous Subjects composing the whole number of mankind and other reasonable beings, if any. But the terms in which he spoke of it being general, and the idea that each reasonable being actually made the world by experiencing it being too preposterous even for German assimilation, it soon came about that the Subject was taken to mean an Universal Subject with an Universal Consciousness; and so the original Erlcenntnisstheorie of Kant became ex panded and in?ated into that monstrous windbag, or collection of windbags, known as post-kantian Idealism.
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