Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 9, 2025

The Polyphony of Modern Rationality—The Encounter between Kant and French Philosophy

(Abstract)

Li Kelin

The historical encounter between Kant’s thought and French philosophy constitutes a decisive turning point in the formation of modern rationality. Kant refuted Cartesian notion of purely thinking subject and instead constructed the relationship between subject and object in reality through transcendental idealism. At the same time, inspired by Rousseau’s social contract theory, he developed a new conception of the state rooted in reason and autonomy. French philosophers, in turn, responded to Kant’s critical rationalism by transforming both the methods and the objects of philosophical inquiry. This dialogue inaugurated a genuine philosophical event that signaled Europe’s passage into modernity, breaking with the unified grammatical horizon of Latin scholasticism that had long sustained theoretical reflection. Through sustained engagement with Kantian ideas, French philosophy repeatedly transcended its own inherited intellectual frameworks, re-examining the totality of its historical situation and redefining the scope of philosophical discourse. The encounter with Kant thus became a critical moment of self-definition and self-determination for French thought, where its intellectual energies crystallized into new paradigms of reflection. Today, as humanity again confronts a decisive threshold in its self-understanding, retracing the historical morphology of this Franco-German dialogue undoubtedly serves to chart a course for our own theoretical choices, grounded in a critical reflection upon and analysis of the development of continental philosophy and the formation of European thought.