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Eighteen years after Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason had appeared, Johann Gottfried Herder published an extensive and rigorous critique of Kant’s opus magnum. Far from being a purely critical study, Herder’s Metacritique is also a presentation of his own thought in metaphysics and epistemology.
Herder rejected Kant’s so-called “Copernican revolution” with its preference of the subject and considered Kant’s precritical thinking the better theory. In his Metacritique, Herder connects epistemology with philosophy of language, history and cultural theory with metaphysics and universalistic values. He criticizes the subject-centred and mechanist theory of his days and presents a keen and detailed analysis of Kant’s transcendental theory.