  In 1787 Jacobi published David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, a Dialogue. In it he tried to clear himself of the charge of irrationalism brought against him because of his defence of the primacy of Glaube (‘faith’ or ‘belief’) over reason in the still on-going controversy. Though appealing to the authority of Hume in this defence, Jacobi however also forcefully distanced himself from the latter’s scepticism by declaring the sense in which he was rather a realist. The dialogue appeared in the wake of the publication of the second edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1787), and included an appendix in which Kant’s transcendental idealism was severely criticized. The appendix was to become a locus classicus of anti-Kantianism.  It eloquently restated all the main objections that had already been raised against the Critique since its first publication, and were to be repeated again against it, in a variety of forms, in the years to come.  It is there that Jacobi made the famous quip: ‘Without the presupposition [of the “thing in itself,”] I was unable to enter into [Kant’s] system, but with it I was unable to stay within it’ (Jacobi, 1787: 223). His point was that, in presupposing the allegedly unknown ‘thing in itself’, yet by assigning to it the many functions that it played in his system, Kant was in fact demonstrating knowledge of it, thereby contradicting his assumption of critical ignorance. The negative, even antagonistic, attitude that Jacobi assumed in this appendix overshadowed the fact, however, that he had always felt close in spirit to Kant. He had felt deeply hurt when Kant has sided with  Mendelssohn[3]  in the still on-going dispute. More important, it also overshadowed the fact that Jacobi had already developed a much more constructive critique of transcendental idealism, and had even offered a sophisticated alternative to it, in the body of the dialogue itself, while expounding his own realism (see Section 2.2). This is an aspect of the dialogue that was not lost on some of Kant’s own disciples, and was a factor in the development of post-Kantian idealism.