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The article is devoted to the problem of identification of the Kant’s and Berkeley’s philosophical systems. The author considers reasons of the origin of Kant-Berkeley question and considers some versions of its completion.

In this paper we try to provide an overview of the impact and reception of Descartes in German idealism. Kant is mostly associated with Descartes since they both are viewed as grounding philosophy in the subjective standpoint. This isomorphism is however limited since Descartes build a metaphysical claim proceeding from the Idea of Infinity present within the subject, whereas Kant isolates himself within the finite subject by excluding any positive ontological infinity. Fichte is even more intensely subjectivist. This might better associate him with Kant. But Fichte's inwardization of the subject develops a definite metaphysical claim: that being actually springs from thinking. While Descartes recovered the unity of thinking with being at the level of being, Fichte recovered the unity of thinking with being at the level of thinking. Schelling tries to unite the philosophy of the subject with the philosophy of nature. In this he confronts Descartes mostly by conceiving nature as organic and alive, rather than mechanic and dead. In his late philosophy he actually departs with German idealism as such, by criticizing Descartes and Hegel for - respectively - introducing and accomplishing conceptual negativity as usurpation of the real positive being. It is Hegel that seems to fully acknowledge and incorporate the Cartesian subjectivity and metaphysics (especially following his restoration of the ontological argument), although he only does this by mirroring it with the ontological monism of Spinoza. As such, Hegel's system can also be seen as an attempt to synthesize the Cartesian dualism with the Spinozian monism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lucy Allais’s Manifest Reality offers an attractive new interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Kantian appearances are known through essentially manifest properties, but those properties are construed as belonging ultimately to things in themselves with intrinsic natures. This position can offer a nice account of the sense in which appearances and things in themselves are identical (different aspects of the same underlying things) and a metaphysically plausible way to construe appearances as strictly partially mind-dependent. The position is less convincing when it comes to explaining the sense in which appearances and things in themselves remain non-identical. I argue that such a non-identity thesis was in fact crucial to Kant’s use of idealism to explain the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, to his account of the apriority of the representation of space, and to his anti-Leibnizian point that our mathematical and scientific cognition provides not confused representation of underlying (non-spatial) things in themselves, but perfectly exact and strictly true cognition of something else. In closing, I suggest that the hylomorphic nature of Kant’s idealism points toward an alternative conception of the partial mind-dependence of appearances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]