Karl Leonhard Reinhold

Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757 to 1823) was an Austrian philosopher who did more than anyone of his generation to make Immanuel Kant known to a wider public. Born in Vienna, he trained with the Jesuits and the Barnabites, was ordained a Catholic priest, then left monastic life in 1783, fled to Leipzig and converted to Protestantism. In Weimar he published the Letters on the Kantian Philosophy in Wieland's German Mercury, and the success of those letters brought him a call to the University of Jena, where he taught from 1787 to 1794. There he developed his own Elementarphilosophie, an attempt to ground the Kantian system in a single first principle, which shaped the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the wider movement of German idealism.