one thing i would tack on to the anti-kant rant is this: usually in the hist of ideas you'd connect enlightenment philosophy to enlightenment science, as though philosophy drove the rise of modern science or perhaps emerged from it. at any rate they are supposed to be two sides of same development. it's not that there's nothing to be said for this, but i think the extreme tensions are more conspicuous. i think most of the philosophers of the era are fighting a rearguard action against the material world described in science and on behalf of the human spirit as the source of knowledge or, for heaven's sake, reality. one central piece of this tension is the representational theory of mind or the 'idea idea': the notion that we are only immediately acquainted with the contents of our own consciousness. that never helped anyone do any science, and establishing that you are not dreaming, for example, is not a scientific project: it's entirely irrelevant, say, to whether planetary orbits are elliptical or whatever. (same with any sort of logical positivist reduction of objects to sense contents, etc.)
but now we might think about berkeleyan or kantian or hegelian or schopenhauerian idealism in relation to darwinian evolution. if you take darwin seriously in any way whatever, then the 'forms of sensibility' have just got to be responses to the actual physical environment. creatures who constructed space, time, and causation and imposed them on the world, if there is a world - creatures who lived entirely in the forms of their subjective or collective sensibility - would be extinct. our senses, our experience, if natural selection is anything like true, are adaptations to a real physical environment. right? i think it was obvious that the thing was false before darwin, but kant's philosophy - to say nothing of hegel's - is entirely incompatible with any sort of scientific naturalism. that doesn't entail that it's false. but it does entail that you can rationally believe at most one of them.
