Renouvier, Charles Bernard (1815–1903)

Charles Renouvier is the main representative of French Neo-Kantianism in the nineteenth century. Following Kant, he delimited the conditions for the legitimate exercise of the faculty of knowledge, and denounced the illusions of past metaphysics. Wishing to go further than Kant in this direction, he criticized the notions of substance and of actual infinity. According to him, relation is the basis of all our representations, reality is finite, and certainty rests on liberty. In ethics, he took into consideration, beyond the ideal of duty, the existence of the desires and interests to which history testifies.