Manifest Reality: Kant's Idealism and his Realism
Lucy Allais
Abstract
This book presents an interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism. It argues that his distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. He is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he does not assert the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects. It is argued that we cannot understand Kant ... More
This book presents an interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism. It argues that his distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. He is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he does not assert the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects. It is argued that we cannot understand Kant’s idealism without a clear account of his notion of intuition and of the role of intuition in cognition: intuitions are representations that give us acquaintance with the objects of thought. Kant’s idealism limits empirical reality to that with which we can have acquaintance. He thinks that this empirical reality is mind-dependent in the sense that it is not experience-transcendent, rather than holding that it exists literally in our minds. Reading intuition in this way enables us to make sense of Kant’s central argument for his idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and to see why he takes the complete idealist position to be established there. This shows that reading a central part of his argument in the Transcendental Deduction as epistemological is compatible with a metaphysical, idealist reading of transcendental idealism.
Keywords:
transcendental idealism,
idealism,
Kant,
Transcendental Aesthetic,
Transcendental Deduction,
intuition,
things in themselves,
phenomenalist,
empirical reality,
experience-transcendent
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198747130 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198747130.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Lucy Allais, author
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg / University of California, San Diego
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