Reinhold Karl Leonhard (1743–1819), Austrian philosopher who was both a popularizer and a critic of Kant. He was the first occupant of the chair of critical philosophy established at the University of Jena in 1787. His Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie (1786/87) helped to popularize Kantianism. Reinhold also proclaimed the need for a more ‘scientific’ presentation of the critical philosophy, in the form of a rigorously deductive system in which everything is derivable from a single first principle (‘the principle of consciousness’). He tried to satisfy this need with Elementarphilosophie (‘Elementary Philosophy’ or ‘Philosophy of the Elements’), expounded in his Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (‘Attempt at a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation,’ 1789), Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Missverständnisse der Philosophen I (‘Contributions to the Correction of the Prevailing Misunderstandings of Philosophers,’ 1790), and Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens (‘On the Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge,’ 1791). His criticism of the duality of Kant’s starting point and of the ad hoc character of his deductions contributed to the demand for a more coherent exposition of transcendental idealism, while his strategy for accomplishing this task stimulated others (above all, Fichte) to seek an even more ‘fundamental’ first principle for philosophy. Reinhold later became an enthusiastic adherent, first of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and then of Bardili’s ‘rational realism,’ before finally adopting a novel ‘linguistic’ approach to philosophical problems. See also FICHTE, KANT, NEO- KANTIANIS. D.Br. reism, also called concretism, the theory that the basic entities are concrete objects. Reism differs from nominalism in that the problem of universals is not its only motivation and often not the principal motivation for the theory. Three types of reism can be distinguished. (1) Brentano held that every object is a concrete or individual thing. He said that substances, aggregates of substances, parts of substances, and individual properties of substances are the only things that exist. There is no such thing as the existence or being of an object; and there are no non-existent objects. One consequence of this doctrine is that the object of thought (what the thought is about) is always an individual object and not a proposition. For example, the thought that this paper is white is about this paper and not about the proposition that this paper is white. Meinong attacked Brentano’s concretism and argued that thoughts are about ‘objectives,’ not objects. (2) Kotarbigski, who coined the term ‘reism’, holds as a basic principle that only concrete objects exist. Although things may be hard or soft, red or blue, there is no such thing as hardness, softness, redness, or blueness. Sentences that contain abstract words are either strictly meaningless or can be paraphrased into sentences that do not contain any abstract words. Kotarbinski is both a nominalist and a materialist. (Brentano was a nominalist and a dualist.) (3) Thomas Garrigue Masaryk’s concretism is quite different from the first two. For him, concretism is the theory that all of a person’s cognitive faculties participate in every instance of knowing: reason, senses, emotion, and will.
See also BRENTANO, KOTARBIG GSKI , MEI — NON. A.P.M.