Between Kant & Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism stakes its claim, with a kind of quiet but decisive ambition, on two linked fronts: it offers, first, a rigorously delimited documentary core of seminal writings from the decades between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Phenomenology of Spirit, and second, a pair of large-scale interpretive essays and a carefully reflective translational apparatus that together recast this fragmentary material into a determinate philosophical narrative. The volume’s distinctive contribution lies in the way it uses Kant’s critical turn and Hegel’s early Jena reflections as the two ends of a conceptual arc, then threads through that arc the work of Reinhold, Schulze, Fichte, Maimon, Beck, Hegel, and Schelling, so that the “gap” between Kant and Hegel appears as a densely structured field of struggles over consciousness, skepticism, system, and nature, rather than an obscure transitional episode.
The preface already discloses that this architecture did not originate as a straightforward execution of a single plan, but as the unexpected result of a strategic decision: two independently conceived projects—a general anthology from the crucial “generation between Kant and Hegel” and an edition of key essays from the Critical Journal of Schelling and Hegel—were fused in order to make either possible at all. What had been a pragmatic coalescence of material goals revealed, in the course of the translators’ work, an underlying organic unity: the texts, once juxtaposed, displayed a “remarkable coherence” of philosophical experience that surpassed any merely external editorial rationale. The volume thus stages within its own genesis precisely the movement it seeks to expose historically: initial motives that seem merely tactical are overtaken by the inner systematicity of the material, and the editors themselves become witnesses of a logic that binds Reinhold’s “facts of consciousness,” Schulze’s skeptical counter-attack, Fichte’s radicalization of subjectivity, Maimon’s stubbornly critical insistence, Beck’s phenomenological re-reading of Kant, and Hegel’s and Schelling’s work in the Critical Journal into a single, though conflict-ridden, development.
The outer framing is decisive for how the anthology is to be read. Di Giovanni’s “Facts of Consciousness” that introduces Part I, and Harris’s “Skepticism, Dogmatism and Speculation in the Critical Journal” for Part II, are not simply prefatory remarks; they function as internal meta-reflections on the period’s self-understanding and as interpretive matrices that determine which tensions in the texts will be thematized as genuinely epoch-making. The first introduction is organized around the thesis that Kant was deeply, and in some respects productively, misunderstood by his contemporaries, precisely because he worked so thoroughly within the vocabulary of “facts of consciousness” that he appeared to be operating on Enlightenment assumptions that in truth he was displacing. The second takes as its guiding thread the evolution, within Hegel’s early work with Schelling, of a conception of skepticism which—far from representing a merely negative stance against reason—comes to mark a necessary moment in speculative logic itself. Both essays continuously cross-reference the translated texts, and the texts in turn retroactively confirm or complicate the theses of the essays; the volume’s composition is therefore circular in a self-conscious way, enacting the kind of dialectical interplay between reflection and content that it attributes to post-Kantian philosophy itself.
The first large conceptual block is the reconstruction of the situation into which Kant’s Critique intervened. Di Giovanni shows in detail how, by 1770, Wolffian rationalism had already been weakened by a series of centrifugal forces: Thomasius-inspired pietist anti-intellectualism within the universities, the influx of British empiricism and natural science into the broader educated public, Humean skepticism as both symptom and catalyst of crisis, and the “common sense” response of Reid and his school. These developments did not merely enrich an already stable rationalist framework; they undermined the very ideal of systematic metaphysics and shifted interest toward aesthetic, psychological and practical questions. The so-called “popular philosophers” (Mendelssohn is singled out) are presented as one expression of this shift: they cultivate moral and aesthetic edification rather than speculation, and they attempt to give philosophy a socially pedagogical vocation rather than a strictly systematic one. This already indicates that the later figures in the anthology, who strive to re-establish system, operate against a backdrop of suspicion toward system itself.
Simultaneously, religious thinkers such as Hamann and Jacobi deploy both empiricism and skepticism to undercut the pretensions of philosophy and reason as such. Their interventions transform the classical philosophical distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact into a theological conflict about the relation of faith and reason. Thus, by the time Kant publishes the Critique of Pure Reason, the situation is characterized by dissension and doubt at several levels: disagreement between schools, distrust in the feasibility of metaphysics, and anxiety about the authority of reason vis-à-vis faith. The only consensus, Di Giovanni suggests, was the conviction that philosophy must take its start from the “facts of consciousness”—that is, that anything like first principles must be grounded in what consciousness is immediately given as its own.
Here Kant’s self-description as introducing a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy is read as easily misinterpreted. His contemporaries, habituated to think of consciousness as an inner theatre of private data, heard him as entering one more round of debate about the nature and content of these facts, and assumed that his contribution would be as inconclusive as earlier ones. At the same time, they heard Kant making extremely bold claims about having stopped the tide of skepticism, restored a scientific rigour akin to Wolff’s, and reconciled faith and reason. The combination of these strong claims with a familiar vocabulary produced the misunderstanding: commentators did not register that he had significantly altered the meaning of “fact of consciousness” itself.
The crucial Kantian shift, as Di Giovanni emphasises, is the insight that facts of consciousness need not be construed as facts about consciousness alone. Conscious acts are always directed toward an object, and that object stands, if genuinely given, in a relation to consciousness as an irreducible term. To reflect on the forms of consciousness is therefore simultaneously to delineate, in outline, the structure of a possible objective world. From this follow three consequences that organize the entire first half of the anthology. First, while Kant can still accept the Cartesian idea that philosophy must begin in some sense from self-consciousness, he does not reduce all knowledge to reflection on the ego’s own inner states; the ego itself is an empty form that demands an extra-conceptual content, and the consciousness of an object cannot be collapsed into consciousness of consciousness. Second, although our knowledge of the “thing-in-itself” is restricted to its appearances, the “thing-in-itself” remains indispensable as the ideal pole of reference for thought and as a way of marking both what cannot be derived from pure concepts and what might be freely produced by thought without being recognizable as such under sensible conditions. Third, sensation acquires a specific existential function: it is the locus where abstract thought-intentions are realized; in Kant’s letter to Beck, knowledge is defined as the representation, through concepts, of a given object, and the “given” is supplied by intuition—our only intuition being sensible.
Yet Kant’s own exposition introduces an ambiguity that will haunt his reception and fuels the dramas staged by the texts in Part I. On one hand, he asserts that the possibility of objects of experience can be established a priori by reflecting on the conditions of thought, while maintaining that these objects must be given in experience; on this thesis, we genuinely know the thing only as it appears, but this knowledge is still knowledge of the thing. On the other hand, he frequently formulates his position as though restricting knowledge to appearances entails that the thing-in-itself is in principle unknowable, and that the world of appearances is a mere show behind which reality hides. Once sensations are treated as purely private, subjective states, the problem of relating universal concepts to sensible content becomes as intractable as the problem of relating them directly to the thing-in-itself. The Critique oscillates between these two theses without resolving the tension, and Kant’s own attempts to bridge the gap—invoking schemata of the imagination, appeals to ideas of reason, and the like—are read as postponements rather than solutions.
Solomon Maimon’s Essay in Transcendental Philosophy appears within the introduction as the first fully lucid internalization of this difficulty. Maimon likens sensations to infinitesimal differentials: ideal, vanishing entities that are never experienced as such but must be posited in order to explain how objects of experience emerge. The synthesis of these differentials according to the categories occurs at a pre-conscious level and is only “represented” in the imagination, where the objects of experience appear as psychical constructions. Thus the actual process through which categories organize the manifold is never itself given in experience; the connection between categories and sensible content is at best inferred, never directly exhibited. Maimon refuses to grant either the factual claim that we perceive the order of the categories in the given or the juridical claim that we are authorized to assume that order. His recourse to the idea of our intellect as a finite aspect of the divine intellect, and to a pre-established harmony between our ideal constructions and a divine resolution of the world into its infinitesimal elements, is interpreted by Kant as a regression to Leibniz and Spinoza; yet di Giovanni’s presentation makes clear that Maimon has pressed the Kantian distinction between thought and sensibility to a point at which the critical architecture trembles.
From here, the introduction proceeds to the second decisive turning point: the appearance of Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s Essay towards a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation and his subsequent Philosophy of the Elements. Reinhold’s role within the volume is structurally ambivalent, and the anthology’s selection of his Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge is framed precisely to display this ambivalence. On the one hand, Reinhold is presented as the author who makes Kant popular, who “translates” the Critique into the idiom of Enlightenment “facts of consciousness” and thereby secures it a wide audience. On the other hand, this same translation is what “forces critical philosophy back into the conceptual straightjacket of the Enlightenment,” emphasizing the scientific and systematic ambitions and paying only lip service to the internal “critical skepticism” that had animated the Critique. In Reinhold’s hands, Kant’s project becomes a program for establishing philosophy as a strict science by grounding it in an absolutely secure “fact of consciousness”; the very element that, for Kant, destabilized reason from within—its antinomic structure—recedes in favour of a quest for a foundational principle that no one can rationally deny.
Reinhold’s historical self-understanding is captured with particular clarity in di Giovanni’s exposition. For him, the history of philosophy is a series of partial revelations tending toward a final, complete disclosure of truth. At each stage, the formulation of problems and the degrees of internal coherence of solutions measure how close a system lies to this final truth. In the post-Humean situation, the basic question has shifted: the issue is no longer which doctrine is true, but whether truth is possible at all. Modern schools, in responding to Hume, have exhausted the available options and entangled themselves in mutual implication and contradiction. Kant’s critical philosophy appears to be the candidate that breaks this impasse; yet the persistence of disagreement and misunderstanding about it shows, for Reinhold, that something is still missing. That missing element is a properly architectonic “philosophy of the elements,” a general theory of the faculty of representation that would provide the ultimate principle from which critical philosophy and metaphysics alike can be systematically derived.
The anthology makes this Reinholdian ambition palpable by letting us read directly from The Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge, after the introduction has patiently unpacked the conceptual grammar of his central move: the formulation of a principle of consciousness. The principle states that in consciousness, representation is distinguished by the subject from both subject and object and is referred to both. From this Reinhold derives, in propositionally ordered fashion, a conceptual schema: representation has “material” and “form”; the material implies receptivity and a reference to something outside consciousness, while the form implies spontaneity and the subject’s ability to relate representation to itself. The “thing-in-itself” and the “self-in-itself” now enter as posits required to secure the distinction between consciousness and its object, while simultaneously being declared unknowable, since they are supposed to lie beyond the forms of representation. Di Giovanni shows how this structure repeats the ambiguity of Kant in a sharpened form: sensations are understood both as the “material” component of representation and as private, pre-conscious events, thereby becoming at once the supposed point of contact with reality and the greatest obstacle to any objective reference. The effect is to tilt the entire critical enterprise back toward a kind of refined subjectivism in which, as the introduction notes, Reinhold finally locates the only true area of validity of knowledge “within the subject itself,” treating the facts of pure self-consciousness as the final court of appeal.
Schulze’s Aenesidemus, excerpted next in the volume and prepared by the same hand, embodies the retaliation of a rejuvenated Pyrrhonian skepticism against both Kant and Reinhold. The introduction’s account of this text is particularly attentive to Schulze’s self-presentation: Schulze insists that skeptics do not dogmatically deny the possibility of knowledge of things-in-themselves or of determinate limits to reason; they merely contend that, here and now, no science has established either. From this vantage point, Schulze attacks the critical system’s reliance on the thing-in-itself and on the categories’ alleged necessary role in structuring experience, arguing that neither Kant nor Reinhold has demonstrated that such entities or forms are indispensable. The anthology’s excerpt allows the reader to examine directly the rhetorical and argumentative strategies by which Schulze seeks to show that Kantian and Reinholdian claims about the conditions of experience are themselves speculative constructions, and that the supposed “new science” remains exposed to the classical skeptical objection that its criteriological principles cannot be secured without circularity.
Between Reinhold’s foundationalism and Schulze’s negations, Fichte’s Review of Aenesidemus intervenes within the volume as a transformative response, and with it the narrative of Part I subtly shifts its center of gravity. Di Giovanni’s introduction has already prepared the reader to see that Fichte accepts Schulze’s insistence on the primacy of self-consciousness, while rejecting the idea that this primacy must lead into agnosticism about the object. For Fichte, Reinhold’s “principle of consciousness” is not a secure fact from which a philosophy can start, but the expression of a problem: is there a fact whose very articulation guarantees its actuality? What sort of fact would this have to be? The anthology thus leads us to Fichte under the sign of a question: the “self-positing I” is introduced, not as a doctrinal starting point, but as an attempt to locate that point in consciousness where intuition and reflection, unconscious and conscious, coincide. The Review itself, by subjecting Schulze to a sharp idealist reinterpretation, demonstrates how the skeptical attack can precipitate a new form of system-building rather than a simple retreat.
The presence of Maimon’s Letters of Philaletes to Aenesidemus following Fichte, and of Beck’s The Standpoint from which Critical Philosophy is to be Judged, complicates the emerging picture. Maimon, now openly skeptical about the possibility of establishing the connection between categories and intuition, concedes ever less to the hope of a complete critical science. Beck, by contrast, attempts to re-center the entire Kantian project around a refined analysis of appearances as appearances of appearances, pushing the critical method toward a form of “phenomenalism” in which the thing-in-itself recedes and the emphasis falls on the internal articulation of experiential givenness. Part I is thus not a linear progression from Kantianism through skepticism to idealism; it is a criss-crossing of distinct yet intersecting efforts to think the relation of consciousness to objectivity: Reinhold’s foundation in facts of consciousness, Schulze’s Aenesidemean critique, Fichte’s self-positing ego, Maimon’s intensifying skepticism, Beck’s phenomenalizing reinterpretation. Di Giovanni’s essay follows these lines with a certain deliberative slowness, repeatedly bringing to the foreground the unresolved tensions: between theory of consciousness and theory of objects, between the need for a principle and the impossibility of demonstrating any principle without presuppositions, between the drive to system and the ever-renewed possibility of skeptical dissolution.
It is precisely here that the second half of the volume begins to displace the first. The conceptual narrative of Part I establishes “facts of consciousness” as the problem-field within which critical philosophy is both appropriated and transformed. Part II shifts the focus from the facts themselves to the modes of debate that articulate them: skepticism, dogmatism, speculation. Harris’s introduction presents Hegel’s engagement with the Critical Journal as a decisive step in this shift. The journal was conceived by Schelling and Hegel in Jena as a shared platform for “philosophical criticism,” and the anthology includes its programmatic Introduction: On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism Generally, and its Relationship to the Present State of Philosophy in Particular, together with Hegel’s essays How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (as Displayed in the Works of Mr. Krug) and On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy, as well as Schelling’s On the Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy in General.
Harris reconstructs Hegel’s view of Kant as offering an “imperfect form of skepticism”: Kant’s dialectic of pure reason shows that speculative metaphysics, as previously conceived, cannot become a science, but it lacks the positive speculative “Ideas” that would resolve the negative result of critique into a new metaphysical logic. In Hegel’s own 1801 disputation theses, cited and discussed in the introduction, speculative philosophy is defined as the synthesis of infinite and finite in the Idea, and the critical philosophy is said to lack such Ideas and thereby to remain an incomplete skepticism. Moreover, Hegel regards the practical postulates of reason in Kant as tending toward a Spinozistic destruction of philosophy, in that they reintroduce a substantialist metaphysics (of God, freedom, immortality) at the point where critique had abrogated dogmatic metaphysics. Harris’s analysis thus re-situates the Kantian legacy as a crisis that must be resolved less by deepening the theory of consciousness (as in Reinhold) than by reconceiving the interplay of skepticism and speculation within logic itself.
In this light, the long essay On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy assumes a pivotal role. Hegel’s historical revaluation of ancient skepticism is here presented as philosophically motivated: he reads Pyrrhonian and Academic skepticism in their interaction with Plato and the Stoics as moments in a dialectic whereby negative and positive reason reciprocally determine one another. Harris acknowledges that Hegel’s historical claims are not always accurate in detail, yet insists that their point lies elsewhere: Hegel wishes to show that skepticism, when thought in its own right rather than as an external adversary of philosophy, becomes a “moment” internal to speculative thought. This move prepares the later development in which Hegel will reconceive the Phenomenology as the “science of the experience of consciousness,” in which skepticism is no longer an external position but a path that consciousness must pass through in order to arrive at knowing spirit.
Here the book’s internal compositional logic becomes evident. The first part, bound together by di Giovanni’s “Facts of Consciousness,” presents the evolution of post-Kantian thought through the lens of the problematic relation between consciousness and object: the ambiguous role of the thing-in-itself, the difficulty of relating categories and intuition, the competing attempts to secure a foundation either in a principle of representation or in the self-positing ego, and the persistent threat of skeptical dissolution. The second part, under Harris’s sign of skepticism, dogmatism, and speculation, reveals a Hegel who has learned from this entire development but who now shifts attention from what consciousness claims to know to how arguments and positions confront one another. The “criterion” that Kant had perhaps sought in intellectual intuition, and that Reinhold had tried to locate in a primal fact, is now relocated in the debate itself. Philosophy becomes reflexive: it knows itself, and the conditions of its own validity, in and through the confrontation of skepticism, dogmatism, and speculative reason.
The volume’s framing essays are explicit that this story is partial. The focus on the Critical Journal introduces a bias: figures such as Jacobi are absent, and the moral-practical side of the debate receives much less direct documentation than the epistemological and logical side. Yet this acknowledged limitation is itself philosophically productive. It directs the reader to perceive the selected texts as one “aspect of the story of the events that run from Kant to Hegel”—the aspect wherein the internal antinomies of reason, the relation between consciousness and its object, and the status of skepticism as method or threat, are worked through with particular intensity. Other aspects—the moral, the religious, the aesthetic—are left to other volumes, but the editors insist that without this epistemological and logical core, those other dimensions cannot be fully grasped.
The translation and editorial apparatus, finally, should be understood as part of the book’s philosophical content, not merely as scholarly scaffolding. The translators explicitly discuss three key terminological decisions: the consistent differentiation of wissen and erkennen by “knowledge” and “cognition” (in Hegel especially), the distinction of Verhältnis and Beziehung by “relation” and “connection” or “reference,” and the choice of “ego” rather than “I” or “self” for ich. Each decision reflects a conceptual thesis: in Hegel, knowledge and cognition are not interchangeable; relations and connections function differently within his epistemology; ego must be heard against the Cartesian background, so that the reader is constantly reminded that the apparent immediacy of the subjective “I” is itself a historical construction. The care with which the translations navigate such nuances reinforces the book’s overarching aim: to bring the debates of the period into English in a way that neither domesticates their conceptual strangeness nor freezes German idioms into awkward literalism. The same holds for the apparatus of notes and bibliography, which, while extensive, are designed to keep the reader within the orbit of the primary texts rather than to drown them in secondary literature; the revised edition’s updated bibliography marks the widening of the field—Jacobi in English, Breazeale’s Fichte, Kuehn on common sense, Beiser on reason’s fate—without allowing this newer scholarship to displace the anthology’s own internal argument.
As a whole, Between Kant & Hegel composes, out of translations, introductions, and editorial reflections, a multi-layered representation of a period in which philosophy struggled to reconstruct its own possibility after the critical turn. Its first part maps the internal tensions of that reconstruction in terms of consciousness, representation, and the thing-in-itself; its second part recounts how those tensions culminate in Hegel’s project to convert skepticism into an inner moment of speculative logic. The different elements of the book—strategic origin, organic unity, selection of authors, thematic division, interpretive essays, translation decisions—do not simply coexist; they continually act upon one another, so that the anthology’s initial aim to “fill a lacuna” is gradually displaced by a more determinate insight: that the space “between Kant and Hegel” is both narrower and more intricate than the standard narrative suggests. The result is a work that functions at once as a sourcebook, a guided path through difficult terrain, and an implicit invitation to re-think the continuity of German Idealism as a protracted, self-transforming conversation about what it means for reason to know itself and its world.
Simon Gros 
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