國立臺灣大學哲學論評

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Professor Mou Zongsan once proclaimed: “Kant has no great successors in the West.” Recently, Professor Karl Ameriks also uttered: “A supposed childless professor, Kant the metaphysician left behind a fertile family of illegitimate heirs.” By contrasting Mou’s and Ameriks’ perspectives employed to express a somehow shared sentiment, this paper intends to extract the philosophical imports from this seemingly mere sentiment taking place in the history of philosophy..
Mou believes that Kant is often too polite to attribute “intellectual intuition” exclusively to God. Instead, Mou, by taking the stand of Chinese practical philosophy, attributes “intellectual intuition” to humans, thus dissolves the gap between “phenomena and thing-in-itself” and further establishes an “absolute realism” based on values. Ameriks, on the other hand, thinks that Kant’s philosophy is apologetic and modest in comparison to its direct successors in German Idealism. The transformation of Kant into the German Idealism through advocating “the primacy of practical reason” by K. L. Reinhold, however, also misunderstands Kant’s very basic discourse of critical philosophy. On the other hand, in the absence of English translation of Reinhold’s Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, the Anglo-American Kantians, get Kant’s philosophy expressed in a completely different direction. By following the thread of exact science, they convert the Kantian philosophy to logical positivism, scientific realism and pragmatism, and thus miss the critical flavor of Kant’s original insights. Only the early Romantics, in Ameriks’ view, have inherited Kant’s critical philosophical thinking.