Introduction

Abstract

Through the nineteenth century to the present, generations of philosophers have from time to time publicly commended successive returns to Kant: some, exegetically, to his texts, e.g. in some variants of neo-Kantianism; others, to the spirit of his philosophy. These returns took various forms, were undertaken through different philosophical paths, and staged by thinkers as different as Husserl and Peirce, as a means of achieving different and, sometimes, incompatible aims. But we just cannot philosophise as if Kant had never existed, and even at present the famous aphorism attributed to Liebmann is not entirely unjustified: “You can philosophise with Kant, or you can philosophise against Kant, but you cannot philosophise without Kant”.