Vaihinger als Kantkommentator

Abstract

Abstract Hans Vaihinger’s Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason claims to approach its subject from an interpretatively neutral (“non-partisan”) standpoint, neither uncritically adopting any existing line of interpretation nor arguing for his own philosophical standpoint. Instead, Vaihinger aims not only to exhaustively comment on Kant’s text itself, but also on the full scope of the philosophical interpretation of the First Critique from 1781 through 1881 and its merit as a representation of Kant’s thought. Therefore, much of the worth of Vaihinger’s Commentary rests on his claim of neutrality. While multiple scholars have given Vaihinger credit for the Commentary’s relative independence from his own thought as expressed in The Philosophy of As If, doubt about the feasibility of a “non-partisan” philosophical commentary in general and the independence of Vaihinger’s Commentary from his Philosophy of As If in particular has been raised, too. This paper aims to shed light on the question of the actual dependence or independence of the Commentary on Vaihinger’s own philosophical thought by analyzing a controversy between Vaihinger and Friedrich Paulsen about the basic question of Kant’s First Critique. Reconstructing Vaihinger’s reasoning from the first volume of his Commentary in this regard as well as his correspondence with Paulsen, it is shown that Vaihinger’s Commentary is indeed misunderstood if construed as insinuating a fictionalism in Kant or as setting up fictionalism as an answer to Kant’s own basic question in the First Critique, as understood by Vaihinger.