Comrades:

Plato

Even to be considered as potentially one of my comrades, you have to be a true heavyweight. I think it's safe to say that the Father of Western Philosophy qualifies.

Now, don't get me wrong: it's not like we agree on everything—not by a long shot. Plato's got all this crazy stuff about eternally existing perfect forms like the Beautiful Itself and the Equal Itself, and about an ideal state that is ruled by a philosopher king, and on and on. A little bit looney tunes for my taste.

But underneath all of that, at the fundamental level at which we True Philosophers like to operate, we see eye-to-eye (or i2i?). Like me, Plato believes that there are two worlds—what he calls the sensible world and the intelligible world. I call them the "realm of appearance" and the "noumenal realm."

Our ideas aren't exactly the same, but they're close enough. The key is that the way things appear to us is not the way these things ultimately are—appearances are deceiving. The crucial point for philosophy is to recognize this distinction and to work out its consequences. Plato, unlike most philosophers, gets that.

Plus, he was able to actually pull off what I never could—to be known only by a single name.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Unlike many of my successors, Schopenhauer at least had the decency to acknowledge his debt to me. In fact, he even went so far as to describe himself as my true philosophical heir. Now, of course, he did try to make some criticisms of my ideas, but I guess we all need to establish our identities somehow. Schopenhauer seemed to have some problem with my postulation of the 12 categories that make experience possible, insisting (rather unconvincingly, in my view) that a single category of causality is sufficient. I'll explain more about that later. There are a number of other supposed "errors" in my work that Schopenhauer identifies, but these are mere details.

What is important is that Schopenhauer accepts fully my transcendental idealism—the view that the world as it appears to us is structured by the forms of human cognition. Like yours truly, he sees the fundamental task of metaphysics as one of describing these structures and the ways in which our experience is constructed by them. He also affirms my other key claim that behind the world of appearance is the "thing-in-itself" (see my "Buzzwords" for more on that), which he calls the "will."

Arthur makes it all sound a little different from the way I put it, but he's about as good a philosophical heir as one could hope to find.

Rudolf Carnap

Rudolf studied my Critique of Pure Reason for a whole year under Bruno Bauch and was obviously influenced by my thought. But did admit he was a Kantian? Nope. He had to dismiss my work, along with the rest of old-school philosophy, as "nonsensical metaphysics." (Can you believe this guy's chutzpah?)

Rudolf and his logical positivist buddies were, of course, doing something completely new and unheard of. At least that's what they thought.

Sure, we all have to try to establish our unique identities, but if Carnap were honest, he'd have to admit that beneath all his new "logical" terminology, he's got nothing but good old Kantian transcendental philosophy.

For Carnap, the task of philosophy was not to make claims about the world directly but to analyze the logic of the language of science. Now, I ask you: how different is that from my own program? How different is that from my view that philosophy seeks to unearth the logical conditions that make experience and knowledge possible?

Not very different at all—that's the answer. Carnap is not only my "comrade," he is my student.

Noam Chomsky

Okay, I'll grant that this guy's linguistic theories are a little out there. I'll even grant that I don't know what he's talking about half the time. But I do know about his theory of universal grammar, the idea that there is an innate grammatical structure common to all language. Chomsky holds that this is what makes the learning of language possible in the first place. To me that sounds a lot like a linguistic version of my idea of "pure concepts of the understanding" (which we will talk more about later on).

Rivals:

Gottfried Leibniz

Gottfried and I cover a lot of the same ground in our philosophical systems, and I do have to credit him for introducing the idea of "analytic truth," a notion that plays a key role in my thinking. But this guy just gets into so much wild speculative philosophizing—"dogmatic metaphysics," as I put it—and that is something I must reject.

I think it's important to place certain limits on reason; you won't find me using reason to come up with all kinds of fantastic, harebrained ideas about the nature of reality.

Christian Wolff

Wolff was a disciple of Leibniz. Dogmatic metaphysics redux.

David Hume

Sometimes a worthy rival can be more valuable than a loyal friend. Hume, always the good empiricist, insisted that all knowledge comes from experience—even the idea of causality. He then went ahead and said that we never come across causality in our experience and therefore can't even justify our appeal to it.

Hume's argument was intriguing, but I knew, just knew, that there had to be something wrong with it. But what?

Finally, after much laborious thought—you can't imagine the struggle I went through—I realized the solution: causality is not gained from experience but is an assumption that makes experience possible in the first place. As such, it is indispensable. This is the key to my "Second Analogy," a central part of the first Critique.

But I was always grateful to old David, famously crediting him with "first interrupting my dogmatic slumber" (source).

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Sometimes a rival is just a rival. Didn't Freud say something like that?

But, really, I don't like this guy, despite the fact that we've never met. Why? Well, first of all, he steals my concept of the dialectic and then he totally misuses it. I made it clear that "dialectic" is a way only of detecting bogus arguments, of exposing the illusion of knowledge. So what does Hegel do? He puts dialectic at the center of philosophy and insists that it yields the highest truth. What gives?

If that weren't bad enough, this guy goes on to undermine—or attempt to undermine—my whole program of transcendental philosophy. My approach depends on drawing a sharp distinction between our knowledge and the logical conditions that make that knowledge possible. Philosophy's concern is solely with the latter, with the attempt to specify in advance what we can know; that is how I save philosophy from engaging in endless, pointless speculation.

But Hegel is unimpressed by this revolutionary move. He says that my philosophy is like a swimmer who vows not to venture into the water until he knows how to swim. (Which means that the swimmer—and my philosophy—will never get anywhere.) With that silly analogy, Hegel thinks he can dismiss the most important philosophical advance in history.

Did I mention I don't like Hegel very much?