Kantian Psychologism

For more than a hundred years now, the dominant view amongst scholars has been that Kant's philosophy has nothing to do with psychology, or, at the very least, that psychology is inessential to Kant's philosophical project. In the early reception of Kant's work, however, psychology played a central role. Philosophers such as Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, Jakob Friedrich Fries, and Friedrich Eduard Beneke all maintained that Kant's philosophy could only be justified on the basis of a psychological account of cognition. In my dissertation I show that this tradition should be interpreted as a reasonable response to the problems that these early Kantians encountered in Kant's philosophy and that, though it is now mostly forgotten, this tradition formed an important part of the philosophical landscape in Germany around 1800.