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G. Anthony Bruno, Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant, Oxford University Press, 2025, 352pp., $115.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198875673.
Reviewed by Steven Crowell, Rice University
To preserve the unrestricted authority of reason in the moral sphere, Kant argued that the scientific use of reason yields knowledge of appearances only, not of things as they are in themselves. This trade-off sparked both consternation and controversy. Among Kant’s contemporaries, the most prominent—J. G. Fichte—set the terms for “German Idealism”, the project of constructing a consistent rational system on the basis of Kant’s “Copernican Turn”. In the second half of the nineteenth century, neo-Kantian philosophers pushed back against this idealism—as did Dilthey’s hermeneutics and the Brentano-inspired phenomenological movement—without fully escaping its pull. Underlying these developments, as G. Anthony Bruno shows in his splendid new book, was anxiety over the “fate of reason”.
The past fifty years have seen an efflorescence of studies that…
