The Story of a Phantom Conflict: The Dispute over Leibniz’s Philosophy in the Second Round of the Kant-Eberhard Controversy

Abstract The controversy involving Eberhard is almost always studied from Kant’s point of view, with its second round largely neglected following Kant’s publication of “On a Discovery” in 1790. Yet, far from the rhetorical struggle to reappropriate the Leibnizian heritage that dominated the first round, Eberhard’s replies after 1790 seek to challenge Kant’s characterization of dogmatic philosophy, to which those who called themselves dogmatic philosophers did not subscribe. In particular, Eberhard challenges Kant’s claims that Leibniz made no preliminary investigation into the power of a priori knowledge and thus made an unlimited use of reason. Through this confrontation, Eberhard intends to show that Kant is mistaken about the status of geometrical propositions and that his conception of a priori intuition stems from a confusion between the content and the mode of access to the proposition. For Eberhard, there is no such thing as an a priori intuition; moreover, there is a sense in which one can have cognition, though limited, of things-in-themselves. Despite all his efforts to show that Kant was inciting a phantom conflict with a strawman Leibniz, Eberhard recognized that in the end, he had no effect on Leibniz’s reception and had thus started a phantom conflict of his own.