This chapter sets out the origins of the traditional historiography of early modern philosophy based on the dichotomy of empiricism and rationalism. After reconstructing the spread of the notions of empiricism and rationalism in Germany during the 1780s, we argue that the first outline of a history of metaphysics that displays the Kantian, epistemological, and classificatory biases can be found in Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s works from the early 1790s. Two early Kantian historians, Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann and Johann Gottlieb Buhle, turned Reinhold’s outline into fully fledged histories of early modern thought. Tennemann, who became a Kantian after reading Reinhold’s works, developed Reinhold’s historical sketches into a detailed, nuanced, and comprehensive account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy that revolves around the empiricism/rationalism distinction and displays the biases of the traditional historiography. Thus, in Germany, the decline of experimental philosophy and the eclipse of the experimental/speculative distinction went hand in hand with the rise of Kantianism and the development of a historiography based on the empiricism/rationalism distinction.

According to a widespread narrative of early modern philosophy, the early modern period was characterised by the development of Descartes’, Spinoza’s, and Leibniz’s rationalism and Locke’s, Berkeley’s, and Hume’s empiricism. The early modern period came to a close once Immanuel Kant, who was neither an empiricist nor a rationalist, combined the insights of both movements in his new Critical philosophy and inaugurated the new eras of German idealism and late modern philosophy. Several scholars have criticised this narrative for overestimating the importance of epistemological issues for early modern philosophers, portraying Kant’s Critical philosophy as a superior alternative to empiricism and rationalism and forcing most early modern thinkers prior to Kant into the empiricist or rationalist camps. Kant’s three Critiques are the first published works that explicitly contrast the terms ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’. This chapter sets out Kant’s contributions to the genesis of the historiographical narrative based on the dichotomy of empiricism/rationalism and argues that Kant is not directly responsible for the biases of that narrative. Kant did not regard the empiricism/rationalism distinction as purely epistemological, did not portray most of his early modern predecessors as empiricists or rationalists, and did not place himself over and above empiricism and rationalism.