Fries lecteur de Kant

Abstract

In the opinion of Jakob Friedrich Fries, Kant made damaging concessions to philosophical dogmatism, the contradictions of which he himself had pointed out with outstanding perceptiveness. So the distinction he made between transcendental knowledge (a form of knowledge of knowledge) and its object (the a priori knowledge it refers to) is not as rigorous as it should have been. Kant came to the conclusion that transcendental knowledge was itself a form of a priori knowledge, and tried to base synthetic a priori judgements upon various forms of knowledge that were themselves a priori. Kant was thus the victim of a “prejudice in favour of proof”, to which he gave the specific form of a “prejudice in favour of the transcendental”. As “transcendental deduction” tries to provide “transcendental proof” of the validity of our knowledge, the Kantian theory of knowledge is threatened by a vicious circle. According to Fries, therefore, transcendental deduction should only be a subjective (psychological and anthropological) deduction which does not mean that he aims to reduce philosophy to psychology despite the contrary opinions of those who hold his psychologism in contempt.