His "elementary philosophy" (Elementarphilosophie) also influenced German idealism, notably Johann Gottlieb Fichte, as a critical system grounded in a fundamental first principle.

In late 1772, at the age of fourteen he entered the Jesuit college (Roman Catholic seminary) of St. Anne's Church, Vienna (Jesuitenkollegium St.

In 1778 he became a teacher at the Barnabitenkollegium, on 27 August 1780 he was ordained as a priest, and on 30 April 1783 he became a member of the Viennese Freemasonry lodge "Zur wahren Eintracht.

In 1784, after studying philosophy for a semester at Leipzig, he settled in Weimar, where he became Christoph Martin Wieland's collaborator on the German Mercury (Der Teutsche Merkur), and eventually his son-in-law.

[3] In 1788, Reinhold published Hebräischen Mysterien oder die älteste religiöse Freymaurerey (The Hebrew Mysteries; or, The Oldest Form of Freemasonry) under the pseudonym Decius.

The development of the Kantian standpoint contained in the New Theory of Human Understanding (1789), and in the Fundament des philosophischen Wissens (1791), was called by its author Elementarphilosophie.

Reinhold tried to show that Kant's philosophy provided an alternative to either religious revelation or philosophical skepticism and fatalistic pantheism.

The last part of the Critique is where Kant discussed the issues of morality and their relation to the Rational Ideas of God, Free Will, and life after death.

By presenting these concerns to the public, instead of the extremely difficult epistemology that took up most of the beginning and middle of the book, Reinhold aroused great interest.

According to historian of philosophy Karl Ameriks, "Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel all developed their thought in reaction to Reinhold's reading of Kant..."[7] There is a Faustian tendency in Reinhold's assertion that a person can hope for a future reward only because that person is constantly striving to be good.

New philosophies are fated to struggle repeatedly in order to survive in a dialectic of history in which progress is unconsciously occurring.

According to Professor George di Giovanni, of McGill University, Reinhold tried to provide a foundation for Kant's philosophy in order to remedy this situation.