Charles Renouvier

Charles Renouvier (1 January 1815 – 1 September 1903) was a French philosopher. He considered himself a "Swedenborg of history" who sought to update the philosophy of Kantian liberalism and individualism for the socio-economic realities of the late nineteenth century, and influenced the sociological method of Émile Durkheim.

Quotes

A complete, luminous system of categories, so well disposed that its own law seemed to serve it as proof, and that the spirit, once placed in the admirable labyrinth, found itself there as invincibly restrained, would constitute a perfect philosophy. This science of science would have by its true name "general logic".

Quoted in Giovanni Amendola, La categoria. Appunti critici sullo svolgimento della dottrina delle categorie da Kant a noi, Stabilimento poligrafico emiliano, Bologna, 1913, cap. I, p. 6.

The fundamental principle of Renouvier is this: One cannot speak of things except as they are given to knowledge, as representations, that is, as phenomena. Hence the name "phenomenalism" that was given to the Renouvier system.

While one can neglect to follow the variations of the concept of category in the various German neo-Kantians, without therefore losing any new essential elements for the solution of this problem, one could not instead leave aside Renouvier's doctrine, which is a new doctrine, and, [above all], fruitful for further progress: although the name of [neocriticism], by which she is generally known, suggest a simple return to Kant – similar to that which was carried out in Germany by Zeller and Lange. In truth, Renouvier's criticism did not deprive him of conceiving knowledge and reality in such a way, which implies not only Kant, but also the idealism derived from him, and which constitutes, in the face of German philosophy, an attempt at synthesis and progress. Four points seem to us [above all] worthy of attention in his doctrine; namely: the conception of the relationship as a category of categories, the distinction of the category in the logical moments in which it can decompose, the introduction of the category of Personality, and the conception of the relationship between the category and reality.

Giovanni Amendola, La categoria. Appunti critici sullo svolgimento della dottrina delle categorie da Kant a noi, Stabilimento poligrafico emiliano, Bologna, 1913, Ch. IV, pp. 81-82.

Renouvier aims to base the system of categories on a single generating principle; he takes Kant's philosophy as his starting point, but intends to discover the general law of Kantian categories and reduce them to unity, without however prejudging in this attempt the problem of the relationship between knowledge and reality. As we shall see, in this respect his thinking differs considerably from that of a Fichte or a Hegel. But, when he says that the relation is the most general law to which all categories are subordinate, he draws, it may be said, the conclusion from the idealistic doctrines which preceded him and expresses it with a definitive formula.

Giovanni Amendola, La categoria. Appunti critici sullo svolgimento della dottrina delle categorie da Kant a noi, Stabilimento poligrafico emiliano, Bologna, 1913, Ch. IV, p. 82.

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