Karl Leonhard Reinhold | |
---|---|
Born | 26 October 1757 Vienna, Archduchy of Austria |
Died |
10 April 1823 (aged 65) Kiel, German Confederation |
Education |
Jesuitenkollegium St. Anna (1772–1773) Barnabitenkollegium St. Michael (1773–1778) |
Alma mater |
University of Leipzig (1784; no degree) |
Era | 18th-century philosophy |
Region | Western Philosophy |
School |
Austrian Enlightenment German Idealism |
Institutions | Barnabitenkollegium St. Michael (1778–1783) University of Jena (1787–1794) University of Kiel (1794–1823) |
Main interests
|
Epistemology, Ethics |
Notable ideas
|
Elementary philosophy (Elementarphilosophie), principle of consciousness (Satz des Bewußtseins) |
Karl Leonhard Reinhold (26 October 1757 – 10 April 1823) was an Austrian philosopher. He was the father of Ernst Christian Gottlieb Reinhold (1793–1855), also a philosopher. Reinhold helped to popularize the work of Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century. His "elementary philosophy" (Elementarphilosophie) also influenced post-Kantian German Idealism, notably Johann Gottlieb Fichte, as a critical system grounded in a fundamental first principle.
Reinhold was born in Vienna. In late 1772, at the age of fourteen he entered the Jesuit college (Roman Catholic seminary) of St. Anne's Church, Vienna (Jesuitenkollegium St. Anna). He studied there for a year, until the order was suppressed in 1773, at which time he joined a similar Viennese Catholic college of the order of St. Barnabas, the Barnabitenkollegium St. Michael. In 1778 he became a teacher at the Barnabitenkollegium, on August 27, 1780 he was ordained as a priest, and on April 30, 1783 he became a member of the Viennese Freemasonry lodge "Zur wahren Eintracht."
Finding himself out of sympathy with monastic life, he fled on November 19, 1783 to Leipzig, where he converted to Protestantism. In 1784, after studying philosophy for a semester at Leipzig, he settled in Weimar, where he became Christoph Martin Wieland's collaborator on the German Mercury (Der Teutsche Merkur), and eventually his son-in-law. Reinhold married Wieland's daughter Sophia Catharina Susanna Wieland (October 19, 1768 – September 1, 1837) on May 18, 1785. In the German Mercury Reinhold published, in the years 1786–87, his Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (Letters on the Kantian Philosophy), which were most important in making Immanuel Kant known to a wider circle of readers. As a result of these Letters, Reinhold received a call to the University of Jena, where he taught from 1787 to 1794.