The Story of a Phantom Conflict: The Dispute over Leibniz’s Philosophy in the Second Round of the Kant-Eberhard Controversy
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Arnaud Pelletier
Abstract
The controversy involving Eberhard is almost always studied from Kant’s point of view, with its second round largely neglected following Kant’s publication of “On a Discovery” in 1790. Yet, far from the rhetorical struggle to reappropriate the Leibnizian heritage that dominated the first round, Eberhard’s replies after 1790 seek to challenge Kant’s characterization of dogmatic philosophy, to which those who called themselves dogmatic philosophers did not subscribe. In particular, Eberhard challenges Kant’s claims that Leibniz made no preliminary investigation into the power of a priori knowledge and thus made an unlimited use of reason. Through this confrontation, Eberhard intends to show that Kant is mistaken about the status of geometrical propositions and that his conception of a priori intuition stems from a confusion between the content and the mode of access to the proposition. For Eberhard, there is no such thing as an a priori intuition; moreover, there is a sense in which one can have cognition, though limited, of things-in-themselves. Despite all his efforts to show that Kant was inciting a phantom conflict with a strawman Leibniz, Eberhard recognized that in the end, he had no effect on Leibniz’s reception and had thus started a phantom conflict of his own.
© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Nachruf auf Karl Ameriks (1947–2025)
- Abhandlungen
- The Logical Use of Reason in the First Critique and Its Connection with the Reflective Power of Judgment
- Practical Faith and Theoretical Practice: The Single Logic Underlying Kant’s Deduction of Nature’s Purposiveness and the Deduction of the Highest Good
- Der Platz der ‚Obersten Einteilung des Naturrechts‘ (AA 06: 242.12–19) in Kants Rechtslehre
- Berichte und Diskussionen
- Introduction: Kant and the Berlin Academy
- L’évaluation critique du concept de monade de Béguelin à Kant
- Johann Christoph Schwab et le kantisme
- The Story of a Phantom Conflict: The Dispute over Leibniz’s Philosophy in the Second Round of the Kant-Eberhard Controversy
- Saving Metaphysics: Kant and the Berlin Academy’s Reception of Critical Philosophy
- Mitteilungen zur Logiknachschrift Volckmanns
- Bibliographie
- Kant-Bibliographie 2023
- Buchbesprechungen
- Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet: L’Avènement de la métaphysique kantienne. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2023, 351 pages. ISBN: 978-2406148173.
- Kants Schriften in Übersetzungen. Hrsg. von Gisela Schlüter. Hamburg: Meiner, 2020, 872 Seiten. ISBN 978-3-7873-3858-0. [Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, Sonderheft 15.]
- Mitteilungen
- Gutachter-Dank
- Jahresinhalt Kant-Studien Jg. 116, 2025
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Nachruf auf Karl Ameriks (1947–2025)
- Abhandlungen
- The Logical Use of Reason in the First Critique and Its Connection with the Reflective Power of Judgment
- Practical Faith and Theoretical Practice: The Single Logic Underlying Kant’s Deduction of Nature’s Purposiveness and the Deduction of the Highest Good
- Der Platz der ‚Obersten Einteilung des Naturrechts‘ (AA 06: 242.12–19) in Kants Rechtslehre
- Berichte und Diskussionen
- Introduction: Kant and the Berlin Academy
- L’évaluation critique du concept de monade de Béguelin à Kant
- Johann Christoph Schwab et le kantisme
- The Story of a Phantom Conflict: The Dispute over Leibniz’s Philosophy in the Second Round of the Kant-Eberhard Controversy
- Saving Metaphysics: Kant and the Berlin Academy’s Reception of Critical Philosophy
- Mitteilungen zur Logiknachschrift Volckmanns
- Bibliographie
- Kant-Bibliographie 2023
- Buchbesprechungen
- Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet: L’Avènement de la métaphysique kantienne. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2023, 351 pages. ISBN: 978-2406148173.
- Kants Schriften in Übersetzungen. Hrsg. von Gisela Schlüter. Hamburg: Meiner, 2020, 872 Seiten. ISBN 978-3-7873-3858-0. [Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, Sonderheft 15.]
- Mitteilungen
- Gutachter-Dank
- Jahresinhalt Kant-Studien Jg. 116, 2025
