Kant's Copernican Revolution

KANT'S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION _

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The Transcendental Horizon

J. Everet Green

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All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Green, J. Everet. Kant's Copernican revolution : the transcendental horizon / J. Everet Green. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804~Contributions in theory of knowledge. 2. Knowledge, Theory of. I. Title. B2799.K7G74 1997 121'.092~dc21 97-7883 CIP ISBN 0-7618-0748-9 (cloth: alk. ppr.) ISBN 0-7618-0749-7 (pbk: alk. ppr.)

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Dedication To Zay D. Green who made the journey possible and Roy D. Morrison II whose critical philosophy provided the motivation.

Abstract Immanuel Kant introduced us to a new way of doing philosophy which shows how the human person can grasp only those features of his or her world which he or she is able to realize through his or her own particular mode of experience. Whatsoever appears on the horizon of human consciousness must appear under the determinate conditions of space and time. Therefore human knowledge is limited. We can never have one to one correspondence with the object of knowledge. For transcendental philosophical reflection everything which appears in human experience is phenomena. The novelty of Kant's experimental method in philosophy opens up new ways of exploring and understanding what is involved in the knowing process.

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Foreword Kant's Copernican Revolution: The Tranacendental Horizon by J. Everet Green With this volume Dr. Green has provided a much needed essay on the place of Immanuel Kant in the history of western thought. Placing the focus on Kant's theory of knowledge, Green here sets forth with great clarity the difference that Kant has made to what is happening in our consciousness, tucked away in the gray matter behind our eye balls, when we human beings say, "We know that." Before Kant the "that" that we know was always the object to which our human subjectivity was accommodated through sense perception. After Kant the pure "objectivity" of the objects we perceive became questionable, for Kant considered the contribution that our human consciousness and imagination makes to the synthesis of sense perception and our rational capacity that in his view produced the "objects" of our conscientiousness. Here the "representations" of our consciousness makes the objects possible. This is what Green, following Kant's own lead, calls "the Copernican hypothesis." This volume is an excellent introduction to Kant's critical thinking, for it takes the student to the heart of Kant's critical methodology. At the same time it introduces the student to two divergent schools of Kantian interpretation, thus affording the student an opportunity to develop his/her own perspective on the issues. The centrality of the synthetic a priori judgments to Kant's critical philosophy is discussed in a fashion that provides an entre to the comparison of Kant's transcendental idealism with empirical realism as schools of thought. Green's discussion of the "Transcendental Analytic" and the categories and forms of judgment in relation to human experience, together with his treatment of "causality and objectivity" accounts for the appeal of Kant's philosophy to natural scientists, who have found in Kant an important dialogical partner for the development of critical thinking as such. Finally, one comes away from a reading of Green's essay with a decided impression of the perennial relevance of Kant's critical thinking for the development of the capacities of human consciousness. When the current wave of the fad of "deconstructionism" subsides, as it has already begun to

do, it will be the legacy of Kant that will provide the critical stance for "deconstructing" the projected assumptions about "modernity" that furnish the premise for the deconstructive enterprise. Kant would never deny the constructive character of human thinking in the transcendental apperception, and any clearer analysis of the processes of synthetic judgments would only be welcomed in the effort to understand what is going on in our consciousness when we human beings say, "I know," or "I believe," or "it is my opinion." These degrees of human conviction are not set in concrete, but rather are operations of the human mind to which we must attend for the sake of coherence in thought, relevance in believing, and aptness of opining to the world of phenomena in which we find ourselves, both in the theaters of our TV sets, and of our towns and cities, but above all in the living theaters of our minds. Michael D. Ryan Drew Forest, May, 1997

CONTENTS Introduction Chapter 1 Critical Philosophy and the Copernican Hypothesis 1. What is the Copernican Hypothesis 2. Relation of the Copernican Hypothesis to Kant's Critical Philosophy Chapter II Overview of Recent Debate about Kant's Critical Philosophy 1. The Controversy between Two Schools over Kantian interpretation 2. Different Approaches to Kant's Transcendental Idealism Chapter III Synthetic A Priori Judgments: Its Centrality in the Critical Philosophy 1. Necessity and Universality 2. The Distinction between a priori and a posteriori Knowledge 3. The analytic/synthetic distinction 4. Space and Time 5. Intuition and Concepts 6. Space and Time in Relation to Things in Themselves Chapter IV Kant's Transcendental Idealism 1. Appearance, Things in Themselves and Philosophical Reflection 2. Transcendental Realism versus Transcendental Idealism 3. Transcendental Idealism and Empirical Realism 4. Transcendental Idealism and Philosophical Reflection Table of Contents

Chapter V The Transcendental Analytic 1. The Deduction of the Categories as a Transcendental Proof 2. Categories are Necessary for the Possibility of Experience 3. The Categories Apply a Priori to Experience 4. Categories and Forms of Judgment 5. Categories as Rules Governing Experience

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Chapter VI Causality and Objectivity 1. The Justification of the Categories as a Necessary Requirement for Objective Knowledge 2. The Causal Law as a Transcendental Proposition which can Legitimize Experience

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Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Index

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INTRODUCTION Just as Copernicus radically changed the human perception of the movement of heavenly bodies from the assumption that they all revolve around the observer to the assumption that the observer is somehow moving while the stars are at rest, so Immanuel Kant self-consciously conceived of his epistemology as a Copernican Revolution in philosophy. It is the purpose of this study to explore and to evaluate Kant's claim. Whereas philosophy had always maintained that human knowledge must always be conformed to the objects of knowledge, Kant turned that assumption around. Perhaps we are able to know because objects somehow conform to our human capacity for knowing. The basic problem that Kant attempts to answer in his great work, The Critique of Pure Reason, is "What is knowledge, and how does it arise?" The principal sections of the Critique in which he presents his argument answering these questions are the Preface to the Second Edition, the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental logic.1 Many philosophers and literary critics have dismissed Kant as a typical 18th century rationalist or tried to overcome him by way of some other novel philosophical approach, or they have simply declared his philosophy obsolete.2

'it is in these sections more than any other that Kant highlighted the fact that all theoretical knowledge lies within the limits of actual or possible experience and that our concepts, including the mathematical ones, could not possibly have any sense and meaning, if the range of possible experience was left behind. What is more, it is in these sections that Kant sought and found the universally necessary conditions of the possibility of any experience of objects. The proof of the analytic can be shown to rest on the deduction which, in turn presupposes doctrines of the aesthetic. 2

Less than a decade after the application of the Critique of Pure Reason, Karl Leonhard was able to write that: "with one exception, perhaps there never was a book, so looked up to, so admired, so hated, so faulted, so decried-and so misunderstood." K.L. Reinhoiü, Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschilichen Vorstellungsver-moegens (1789) reprint (1963) p. 12 This comment is as relevant now as it was then. It can also be said that since the

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Introduction

But contrary to these critics, I will attempt to present Kant as a philosopher whose work is still very relevant for the twentieth century. It was conceived in dialogue with the natural sciences, and it was his intention to account for human experience. It is just these features that render his thought so relevant today. Drawing his inspiration from natural scientists like Galileo, Torricelli, and Stahl, he comments that a revelation came to the practitioners of the experimental method in natural science. They learned that reason has insigrb only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept as it were in nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining. The human person can apprehend only those aspects of his world which he or she is able to realize through his or her own particular modes of experience. The primary feature of the Copemican Revolution is the insistence that for an object to exist for us, it must conform to the conditions requisite for knowing it. Kant said that conforming our objects to our knowledge "would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it would be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori determining something in regard to them prior to their being given."4 The revolution in thought thus consists in beginning with the reflection on reason itself, on its presuppositions and principles, its problems, and tasks. Reflection on objects will follow if this starting point is made secure. Critique of Pure Reason began to be felt in the German speaking world and to a large extent in Europe and North America as a whole, there has hardly been a philosophical position that is not related in some way to this work - - even if the influence is in a wholly negative way. ^ Critique of Pure Reason trans. Norman Kemp Smith, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965, B xiii, p.20. All references to the Critique of Pure Reason will be to this edition unless otherwise indicated. 4

Ibid., B xvi, p. 22.

Introduction

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I will argue that this critical philosophy is an inquiry into the power of reason as a faculty of knowledge. It begins by assuming that reason's powers are limited. If it is to know anything, reason requires an object which it cannot itself produce, but instead, must reproduce from something that is given. Kant's Copernican solution makes it possible to explain the failure of all previous efforts towards a scientific philosophy. According to Kant, philosophers previously sought to ground and certify their knowledge in a necessity which they attributed to objects. Philosophers perceived nature as possessing a necessity apart from and independent of the reason which seeks to discover it. But according to Kant, such necessity is in principle unavailable to reason. If reason is to have any certain knowledge at all, it must be a priori knowledge, available through reason's own resources and, besides produced by it. What Kant regards as totally new in his conception of reason's a priori task is the methodology employed. That is why Kant said that: There are only two possible ways in which synthetic representations and their objects can establish connection, obtain necessary relation to one another. Either the object alone must make the representation possible, or the representation alone must make the object possible. In the former case, this relation is only empirical, and the representation is never possible a priori. This is true of appearances, as regards that [element] in them which belongs to sensation. In the latter case, representation in itself does not produce its objects in so far as existence is concerned, for we are not here speaking of causality by means of the will. None the less the representation is a priori determinant of the object, if it be the case that only through the representation is it possible to know anything as an object. The a priori representation does not produce the object, as is the case when we form an idea of an action and then perform it. Rather, says Kant, the representation (category) determines the object in the sense that only through it is the object knowable. Previously, the object was assumed to exist, the problem is to explain how it could be known.

5

Ibid., p. 23.

6

Ibid.,B 123, p. 125.

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Introduction

Knowledge, therefore, was conditional upon an independently existing realm of being. Now, however, Kant proposes to reverse this order making the realm of existing objects dependent upon the subjective conditions of knowledge. The a priori representations determine what can and cannot be known as an object. This revolutionary methodology involves, to a great extent, the substitution of epistemic for ontological concepts and principles. Kant said: The proud name of ontology must give way to the'more modest title of a mere analytic of pure understanding. In a letter to Marcus Herz on February 21, 1772, Kant asks: "what is the ground of the relation ofthat in us which we call 'representation' to the object."8 Kant was interested in the conditions which make experience possible. Since all knowledge is knowledge by a subject, even the most general investigation of the modes and categories of reality will have to begin with an analysis of the limits and preconditions of knowing. In Chapter One I will indicate what is Kant's intention in his references to Copernicus and the significance he draws from these references. In Chapter Two I will give an overview as to how the most wellknown interpreters of Kant have understood his revolutionary method. Attention will be given to the controversy which has developed over Kant, the epistemologist, and Kant, the metaphysician, and the attempt to overcome Kant by Heidegger. Chapter Three will draw attention to the fact that in an attempt to explicate the conditions of experience, Kant introduces us to the problem of his theoretical philosophy by stating that both mathematics and physics rest on synthetic judgments a priori. According to Kant, our knowledge is in part a priori and not inferred from experience; on the other hand, it is also in part a posteriori and based on experience gained by sensory perception. Therefore, there is a sense in which, for

''ibid., A 247/B 303, p. 264. Arnulf Zweig, Kant Philosophical Correspondence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, p. 71.

Introduction

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Kant, human knowledge is composed of both a priori and a posteriori propositions, and these propositions which are mutually related to each other, make possible our knowledge of the world. Chapter Three, therefore, will lift up the problem of the a priori, which Kant applies to all kinds of ideas and mental acts, like intuitions, concepts and judgments. He defines a cognition to be a priori if it takes place independently of all experience.9 There are two connected criteria for cognition a priori. Experience teaches us facts but not necessities. A judgment which is thought together with its necessity and which is thought in strict universality is an a priori judgment. Kant believes that knowledge is a judgment from which a concept arises which has objective validity, that is, to which a corresponding object can be given in experience. The only way that an object can be given is through space and time. For space and time are not given to us, but are the forms under which we perceive all objects of experience. Thus, the only a priori acquaintance with particular objects that we have is in a framework of space and time. Since Kant thinks that a priori knowledge is possible only when our knowledge determines its object rather than the other way around, an a priori intuition must be an element that we contribute to experience, and we can contribute at most the forms of our intuition. All our encounters with particulars presuppose time and all our encounters with "outer" particulars presuppose space. Therefore space and time are the forms of inner and outer sense - - forms of intuition. Kant argues that space and time are pure forms of outer and inner intuition and empirically real though transcendentally ideal.10 Thus, these two aspects (space and time are empirically real and transcendentally ideal) of the critical philosophy will be explicated in

"Ibid., B 3, p. 43. 1 Idealism as understood in the tradition within which Kant was working held that only the existence of minds and their contents is certain, thus making that of material things dubious. Kant thought that he had an effective and foolproof argument against that position. We could not make determinate statements about the time-relations of mental events without presupposing the existence of something more than mental. Matter is thus as certain as mind because commitment to its existence is bound up with the ordering of what goes on in minds.

Introduction

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Chapter Four where it will be shown that Kant draws a distinction between two levels of reflection. From the stand-point of everyday consciousness, we have to say that there is just as much reason to believe in the existence of physical things as there is to believe in the existence of minds. The former in no sense depends on the latter, but must be accounted independently real in their own right. At the level of empirical reflection, there can be no doubt about the reality of material things which are located in space and endure through time. But fron| another level of reflection everything including scientific objects are themselves to be considered as phenomena. Mind puts something of itself into what it knows both at the level of seeing and that of thought. To recognize that space and time are phenomena at the second level - - the level of philosophical reflection in no way invalidates their empirical reality at the first level. Thus, there is a sense in which the validity of claims made at the empirical level is unaffected by any conclusions we come to when we consider the whole empirical order from the philosophical point of view. The transcendental ideality of space and time is affirmed by Kant on the grounds that they function as the a priori conditions of human sensibility. At the transcendental level of philosophical reflection upon experience, ideality is used to characterize the universal, necessary, and therefore a priori conditions of human knowledge. Thus philosophical reflections show a priori judgments to be preconditions for the truth ofjudgments a posteriori. A judgment is a relation which claims objective validity. For example, it makes a claim about how things are "in the object, no matter what the state of the subject maybe."12 Furthermore all judgment, all knowledge, involve, the application of a concept, which is to classify a particular item as being of some general type, as similar in some respects to other actual or possible items.13 However, combination of cases as similar, which Kant calls "synthesis" is something we perform ourselves; it is not simply given to us by our senses. Kant insists that it 1

^Critique of Pure Reason, A 28-30/ B 44-45, A 45-46/B 62-63.

u

Ibid., B 142.

n

Ibid., A 68/B 93.

Introduction

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is an act of spontaneity performed by the understanding, and only if this synthesis is rule-governed can it yield judgments about objects.15 The above discussion has taken us into the Fifth Chapter where Kant formulates the thesis that it is only in the form of synthesis, collection, and unification that cognition is at all possible. Cognition presupposes a unified memory with associated relational functions. Thus, we can only speak of unity in as much as it is a precondition of knowledge. Now we are back to the Copernican standpoint, according to which all knowledge must be explained in terms of the subject's process of knowing - - that is, the preconditions for objective experience lie in the subject rather than the perceptually given (appearances). And experience must be of an object; it derives its objectivity from the categories as they function in determining appearances. Therefore, originally discrete appearances acquire determinations by the categories through synthesis, which is a cognitive act that transforms the perceptually given into objective experience. Consequently, categories (rules by which the mind functions) are the preconditions for the objectivity of experience, so if appearances are to be objective, then they must conform to categories. Kant argues that pure concepts of understanding (categories) and the pure forms of sensibility, (space and time) are conditions without which experience and all objects of experience would be impossible.16 He further argues "Ibid. A 77/B 107, B 129-130. ls

/Wrf.,A105-7, B 132-8.

16

In distinguishing between concept and intuition Kant says that a concept is a rule for combination and synthesis. Thus: "All knowledge demands a concept, though the concept may be quite imperfect or obscure. But a concept is always as regards its form something universal which serves as a rule." (A 106). And about combination he says: "Combination does not lie in objects but in an affair of the understanding alone." (B 135) In trying to emphasize the difference between concepts and intuition he says: "Whereas all intuition, as sensible, rest on affection, concepts rest on functions. By "function" I mean the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representation. Concepts are based on the spontaneity of thought, sensible intuitions on the receptivity of impressions." (A 68/B 93) It is the understanding by the function of the categories which first of all creates the conditions of all knowledge. Sensibility (sense) always presents itself to me in the forms of perceptions (intuition) of space and time,firstas a

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Introduction

that these pure modes of knowledge are objectively valid universal laws to which all possible empirical things necessarily must conform. The a priori forms of consciousness form the structural conditions of the process of knowledge in its causal temporal structure. They are necessary since without them, no cognitive-information process can occur. This is what Chapter Six will demonstrate. I will argue that human knowledge comes about by an interaction of objective structure (the real world) and subjective structures (the cognitive apparatus). Without the contribution of the object there would be no knowledge about the world. Without the contribution of the subject there would be no meaning, no concept, no proposition, no classification, no inference, no knowledge, that takes place between object and subject. Prior to Hume, it was taken for granted that in saying, "the sun is shining and therefore rocks get warm," we should mean no more than "the sun is shining and then rocks get warm." A causal relation was meant to include some specific category, some necessity, and some ontological difference. Hume contends that it does not make sense to talk about causal necessity. What we should mean by "A" causes "B" is "if A, then always B" and nothing more. Hume's critique marks a turning point in the discussion of causality. Kant was disturbed from his "dogmatic slumber"17 and tried to counter Hume's argument by his synthetic a priori judgments. Hume considered causal inferences to be an instinct common to all human beings and even animals. Kant, however, would not content himself with this explanation. Instinct might fail, but the causal principle seemed to be unfailing and indeed infallible. Kant explains the universality (must obtain wherever there is human experience) and necessity of the causal principle by raising it to a synthetic judgment a priori, hence endowing it with a transcendental character such that it is independent of, but at the same time constitutive of, all experience. That there are principles which render factual knowledge possible was an epoch-making discovery for Kant. Thus the essential ground of

chaos of sensations. It still requires the concept, since "perceptions without concepts are blind" and concepts without perceptions are empty. It is reason which atfirstcreates in me an ordered structure of objects by virtue of concepts. 17

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Lewis White Beck, Bobbs-Merrill: Library of Liberal Arts, 1976, p. 8.

Introduction

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the triumphant breakthrough in thought which the Critique of Pure Reason inaugurated and the foundation of its influence lay in the fact that Kant discovered the a priori presuppositions of the experimental sciences themselves. These presuppositions are not discoverable within the boundaries of experience but rather are grounding principles for the possibility of experience. In conclusion I will indicate that although many have decried Kant's synthetic a priori propositions, he still remains the indispensable philosopher today not only for philosophy but for science as well. In spite of Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Husserl, and Wittgenstein, no one has been able to introduce a subsequent epoch-making work comparable to the First Critique. It is important to note that there is a sense in which the experimental sciences, with their research orientation which must examine all dogmatic presuppositions through their own methodology, and the metaphysical tradition, with claims to eternal truths which had been part of the cultural history of the West since the Greeks, both received a definitive solution in the imposing structure of the critical philosophy. ^Referring to Kant, Reichenbach said: "What he wanted was an analysis of reason, what he achieved was an analysis of the science of his time_^ Vollmer reinforced this general idea when he said: "There is no reliable science without epistemology. Every time a philosopher claimed to have found or even proved the theory of human knowledge in general it turned out that he had just formulated epistemological presuppositions of scientific knowledge at his time."19 These comments are more appropriate to Kant than to any other philosopher. His epistemological theory was certainly a consistent philosophical system and revolutionary outlook. This revolutionary outlook has not only been the stimulus for the philosophical systems of the likes of Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Husserl, but what is even more remarkable, Kant's a priori structures are currently being vindicated in

,8

H. Reichenbach, "Kant und die Naturwissenshaften, vol. 21, 1933, p. 626. 19

Natur-wissenschaft,"

Die

Gerard Vollmer, "Mesocom and Objective Knowledge," Concepts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology, ed. Franz M. Wuketits, Dordrecht D. Reidel, 1984, p. 77.

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Introduction

discussions in biology, genetic psychology and developmental psychology. It is in this context that Lorenz can argue that evolution is a cognitive process and that life is, in general, a process of learning. Therefore: One has to postulate the existence of innate teaching mechanisms in order to explain why the majority of learning processes serve to enhance the organism's fitness for survival; Furthermore these mechanisms meet the Kantian definition of the a priori: they were there before all learning and must be there in order for learning to be possible."20 Konrad Lorenz, Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge, trans. Ronald Taylor, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1977, p. 89. See also Lorenz on Kant's "Lehre Vom Apriorischen im Lichte gegenwartigen Biologie," Blatter fur deutsche Philosophie, vol. 15, 1941, pp. 94-125. Lorenz is one of many eminent epistemologists who have been explaining the a priori structures of human knowledge via evolution. Others like Rubert Riedl's approach to evolutionary epistemology is based on a system of comparative biology. Rupert Riedl, "A System-Analytical Approach to Macro-evolutionary Phenomena," The Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 52, 1977, pp. 351-370. For Lorenz and Riedl, the Kantian categories and intuition can be understood as products of evolution. Besides biological approaches to the a priori structures of knowledge, there are those like Karl Popper who have taken a philosophical approach to an evolutionary conception of knowledge. See Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972 and Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography, Glasgow: W. Collins, 1976. See also D. T. Campbell, "Evolutionary Epistemology," in P. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Part I, Open Court, La Salle, 1973, pp. 413-463. The basic idea underlying the evolutionary position in epistemology seems to be the following: cognition, be it in the subhuman or in the human world, is a product of evolution; human knowledge therefore, cannot start from nothing. Hence, the existence of innate cognitive capacities, i.e. a priori structures of knowledge is very probable. However, these structures of knowledge are also the product of evolution. J. Piaget has also contributed to the development of evolutionary epistemology. Piaget was convinced that epistemology must be based on results from scientific investigations into the nature of knowledge - - such convictions underlay the intentions of evolutionary epistemology. Jean Piaget, Genetic Epistemology, Columbia University Press, New York, 1970, Main Trends in Psychology, G. Allen and Unwin, London, 1973. The primary focus of Piaget's work is the importance of understanding biological and psychological preconditions to mental capacities like speech.

Introduction

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Thus, even in science it has been shown that the human person cannot avoid making use of certain axioms and stipulations a priori. But it is primarily in the philosophical realm that the Critique of Pure Reason has made an indelible mark on the cultural traditions of the West. There is a sense in which not only German idealism but the phenomenological movement and positivism an be shown to have originated from the Critique of Pure Reason. Indeed I can confidently state that since the Critique of Pure Reason began to have an effect there has hardly been a philosophical discussion of knowledge that is not related in some way to this work.

Chapter One Critical Philosophy And The Copernican Hypothesis This chapter will answer the following questions: What is the Copernican hypothesis ? and What is its status in the current discussion? The Critique of Pure Reason is a study of what we know and how we come to know it; and, as its title suggests, it limits the epistemic pretensions of reason. Thus, Kant's overall concern is with the nature and scope of human knowledge His concern lies with what we can know and how we can know it. Kant said: Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts have, on this assumption ended in failure. We must therefore make a trial whether we may now have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to their being given. We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus' primary hypothesis.21 Copernicus impresses Kant not so much for his particular contributions in doctrine, or even for his courage in going beyond inherited positions as for his rejection of the established scientific method. For instance, Kant readily admits that he puts forth his doctrine as a mere supposition or presupposition and amenable to strict proof. His chief accomplishment which underlies any doctrinal innovation is the replacement of blind induction with the projection of exploratory hypotheses for which appropriate empirical tests later are designed.

Critique ofPure Reason, Bxvi, p. 22.

Critical Philosophy And The Copemican Hypothesis

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The change in point of view, analogous to this hypothesis, which is expounded in the Critique, I put forward in this preface as an hypothesis only, in order to draw attention to the character of these first attempts at such a change, which are always hypothetical. But in the Critique itself it will be proved, apodictically not hypothetically, from the nature of our representations of space and time and from the elementary concepts of the understanding.22 Kant resembles Copernicus only in that both disavow established and commonsensically attractive doctrines in favor of initially implausible yet demonstrably true alternatives. Hence, resemblance between them stems chiefly from their rejection of inherited error for radically novel method of proof. The Copemican revolution 23 introduces a new way of thinking both in its abandonment of blind induction and its resultant contribution of a new hypothesis about the sun and the earth. According to Kant's Copemican hypothesis, metaphysics, like science, must attend to rules of reason's own making. Just as the scientist forces nature to answer questions devised according to the scientist's own plan, so may reason, Kant hypothesized, force nature to conform to rules of its own devising. According to this hypothesis, experience conforms to our concepts, and knowledge of nature is demonstrably possible because we constitute its laws. "Absolute knowledge" of nature, on the other hand, is impossible

Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxii, p. 25. 23

The Copemican Revolution was a revolution in ideas, a transformation in man's conception of the universe and of his own relation to it. A reform in the fundamental concepts of astronomy is therefore the first of the Copemican Revolution's meanings. Just as Copernicus taught that the movement round the earth which men had ascribed to the sun was only an appearance due to our own movement, so Kant taught that space and time which men had ascribed to reality were only appearance due to ourselves. In other words, Copernicus explained the apparent motion of the observer on the earth. Copernicus had made a shift from the perspective of a stationary observer to that of a revolving observer; he had shown that a change occurs when one disengages the observer's own motion from the observed or apparent motion of the sun, planets, and stars. Kant similarly explains the apparent characteristics of reality as due to the mind of the knower. Kant no longer attributes to an independent reality what seems to belong to human beings.

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Critical Philosophy And The Copernican Hypothesis

because we depend on something given to our faculty of sensible intuition for the content of our knowledge. To elaborate on this further: Kant's Copernican principle specifies that the determination of objects of knowledge depends upon a priori determination by the conditions of human cognition. Thus, the principle involves two inter-related facets. The first concerns philosophical method, and stipulates that what is to be construed as a possible object of knowledge will be a function of what results from a priori analysis of the epistemic conditions and limitations of human cognition. The second concerns human cognition and states that (a) human beings have a sensible intuition, that is, they relate to objects only insofar as they are sensibly affected by them, and (b) human beings have a discursive understanding, that is, they can think objects only through mediate representations (concepts). In the light of the above discussion, it can be said that Copernicus 24 offers Kant the most striking example of how science advances once

A considerable amount of literature has developed regarding the precise point of the comparison and the appropriateness of the Copernican analogy. For many, the main point at issue is whether Kant has committed what is called the "anthropocentric fallacy." In his reading of Copernicus, Norwood Hanson ("Copernicus' Role in Kant's Revolution," Journal of the History of Ideas 20 [1959], pp. 274-81) points out that the explicit comparison of Kant's procedure to that of Copernicus consists simply in noting that they both tried an alternative hypothesis when existing theories proved unsatisfactory. Bertrand Russell, differing, claimed that "Kant spoke of himself as having affected a Copernican revolution but he would have been more accurate if he had spoken of a Ptolemaic Counter revolution since he puts man back at the center from which Copernicus had dethroned him {Human Knowledge [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984], p. 9). For further discussion of the relevant literature on this topic, see S. Morris Angel, "Kant's Copernican Analogy: A Re-examination," Kant Studien 59 (1963): 243-51; Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan and Co., 1923), pp. 22-25; A. C. Ewing, A Short Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), pp. 116ff; James Willard Oliver, "Kant's Copernican Analogy: An Examination of a Re-Examination," Kant Studien 55 (1964) : 505-11; D. Dryer, Kant's Solution for Verification in Metaphysics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), pp. 17-29; Watson, The Philosophy of Kant Explained (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1908); H. J. Paton, "Kant's So-Called Copernican Revolution, Mind vol. 46, pp. 214-217. Like Cross in his 1937 article in Mind, Bernard Cohen in his recent book

Critical Philosophy And The Copernican Hypothesis

15

blind induction has been replaced by the method of projecting exploratory hypotheses. Ptolemaic astronomy had become a diffuse collection of sometimes conflicting doctrines, which threatens its integrity as a science. Also, it had too often sacrificed mathematical rigor and elegance so that it could agree with observation. Copernicus recommends his hypothesis whose precedents in ancient and medieval astronomy he acknowledges, on the ground that its substitution for geocentricism will remedy Ptolemaic astronomy. Copernicus led us into a new way of thinking, but this approach was not the product of a sudden break- through because some elements of Copernicus' primary intention was not a revolution as such, but rather the restoration of astronomy. Irrespective of his merits, he did not initiate a revolution in the same sense of a total subversion of scientific and philosophical thought. What the Copernican theory really did was to signify an innovation in science and philosophy. Copernicus had recourse to some older conceptions and fitted them into a new conceptual scheme.25 Likewise, Kant also aims at restoring betrayed ideals. For him, metaphysics had fallen into disrepute because of its seemingly endless dispute over doctrine; his task was therefore to establish that the discipline could yield demonstrable knowledge after all. Kant, therefore, set out to show that basic synthetic yet a priori principles, the traditional dogmas of metaphysics like the causal law, could be proven. Inherited methods of proof reportedly fell into two groups, inductive and dogmatic, and they surrendered either the synthetic (nonontological) or the a priori (necessary) character of metaphysical principles.26 Kant's method consists primarily in finding a middle way

{Revolution in Science, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1985, pp. 237-253) insisted that the revolution in thought with which Kant at first compares his own has nothing to do with Copernicus. Instead Kant develops at length the concept of revolution in science and intellectual revolution in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique. "In short, a self-proclaimed Kantian Copernican Revolution would seem to have as little real existence as an alleged Copernican revolution in astronomy in the late sixteenth century." (p. 244) 25

See E. Oeser. Wissenschaftheorie als Rekonstruktion: Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Vol I, (Oldenbourg Vienna: Munich, 1979). 'Critique of Pure Reason^ Bxxvi-Bxxxv.

16

Critical Philosophy And The Copernican Hypothesis

between the inductive and the dogmatic method. His alternative is the transcendental 27 method, which he claims avoids the shortcomings of its predecessors. Attendant to this, Kant sees two contributions in the original Copernican Revolution: first, a break-through in method with the replacement of blind induction by the projection of exploratory hypothesis, and second, a radical innovation in method with a consequent change in doctrine. The Kantian counterpart consists in the rejection of both inductive and dogmatic methods for a transcendental one, 28 and the very introduction of the method results in a more obvious shift in doctrine - - to the view that the world as given in our experience

In the Kantian sense, transcendental is used to refer to the ultimate necessary condition for the possibility of experience and knowledge in general. By ultimate necessary condition, we mean necessary condition of all necessary conditions (of experience and knowledge) (B8; B642 B 25). In this sentence Kant seems to say that "transcendental knowledge" is knowledge of necessary truths, not about objects as such but about our knowledge of objects. For Kant, transcendental knowledge also means synthetic knowledge a priori. In using the term transcendental, Kant was basically emphasizing the active aspect of our cognitive faculty. Reason has insight into that which it produces after a plan of its own (Bxiii). This dynamic aspect is brought about by Kant when he says that "the word 'transcendental' which with me never means a reference of our knowledge of things, but only to the cognitive faculty" (Prolegomena, Lewis White Beck Library of Liberal Arts Edition [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1950], p. 41). Thus, a transcendental argument is for Kant one which shows the possibility of certain types of synthetic knowledge a priori by showing how it is due to those active activities of ours by means of which the knowledge in question is obtained. 28

Henry Allison in his article, "Kant's Transcendental Humanism" (Monist Vol. 55 [1971] : 182-207), offers an interesting interpretation relating to the argument. He treats Kant's Copernican Revolution as an attempt to reconcile the transcendental, logical orientation of rationalism with the humanistic, psychological approach of empiricism. He argues that Kant's great achievement consists of showing that philosophy must be fully human, i.e., concern itself with the conditions of human experience, if it is to be genuinely transcendental, and that it can only be fully human, i.e., provide an adequate account of man as a knower and moral being, if it is also transcendental rather than rationalistic.

Critical Philosophy And The Copernican Hypothesis

17

and knowledge is dependent on the structure and activity of our mind. Kant talks about the pure forms of intuition and the a priori categories of understanding as the ultimate necessary conditions of experience and knowledge. Thus, the transcendental proof of a metaphysical principle tries to establish its truth as a precondition for the very objectivity of experience, i.e., any conscious experience at all. As Kant puts it, "the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of objects of experience."29 The account of objectivity points to an a priori element in the construction of objects of experience. Such a proof preserves apriority because the validated principle covers any objective experience whatsoever and syntheticity because it pertains to experience. The legacy of Copernicus is that the proposition of an appearance is determined by a presupposition about the way the objects are given rather than by something that happens from one reason or the other to be true about us as observer. Our knowledge of facts in Kant's view is picked up from day to day in personal experience, but it also contains some elements contributed by us in advance, so to speak, of actual experience. But how can these a priori elements occur? Should we rely on them? How can we authenticate these a priori elements? In his attempt to answer these questions, Kant formulated his transcendental turn in philosophy, that is, object must conform to our cognitive faculties. Thus reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own. Kant's Copernican turn in metaphysics emphasizes that: experiment is itself a species of knowledge which involves under-standing: and understanding has rules which I must presuppose as being a priori. They find expression in a priori concepts to which all objects of experience necessarily conform, and with which they must agree.30

'Critique of Pure Reason, A 158/B 197, p. 194. ''Ibid., Bxvii-vviii, pp. 22-23.

18

Critical Philosophy And The Copernican Hypothesis

Such propositions are synthetic and a priori: synthetic because they give us information about how things are, and a priori because they are established without empirical investigation. These pure concepts of the understanding, constitute the structural basis of man's ability to be aware perceptually, conceptually, and cognitively of what there is.

Chapter Two Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy It is the purpose of this chapter to examine some of the most recent scholarly debates about Kant's thought before proceeding in subsequent chapters to delineate some of the most characteristic features of what he himself called his "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy, as stated in the Preface, the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, second edition. The Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic together form a system of transcendental philosophy which Kant asserts "is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori."^ It is in these two sections, along with the Preface, that Kant attempts to show what the limiting features must be of any notion of experience which we can make intelligible to ourselves. It is in these sections more than any other, that he presents the central arguments for his critical philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason is reason's own self-accounting born of rational self-reflection. In Kantian philosophy knowledge, including philosophical knowledge is regarded as an almost exclusively rational affair so, the limits of reason are also the limits of critical philosophy. Thus, the notion of 'limit' refers to Kant's designation of the boundaries of theoretical knowledge and to the limits of the use of rational categories. This idea of limit is the hallmark of The Critique of Pure Reason. The central element of this necessary limitation is a principle which Kant repeatedly expressed and sought to demonstrate throughout the Critique. This is the principle that there can be no legitimate, or even meaningful, employment of ideas or concepts which Hoes not relate them to empirical or experiential conditions of their application. If we wish to use a concept in a certain way but are unable to specify the kind of experience or situation to which the concept, used in that way, would

31

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B25, p. 59.

20

Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy

apply, then we are not really envisaging any legitimate use of that concept at all. This study is needed because one of the chief controversies over the meaning of Kant's Copernican Revolution has not been satisfactorily resolved. The intense polemic between the Marburg and Heidelberg Kantian schools is a vivid demonstration of this fact. Kant ascribes our awareness of an objective world to our active contributions to the formulation ofthat world. Our ability to comprehend the nature and the structure of our world is dependent on the ways in which we can know it. But just these formulations themselves have led to two very different ways of understanding Kant's critical philosophy. The Marburg School 32 which was the formative influence in the development of Neo-Kantianism, 33 insisted on the central importance of the first Critique and interpreted it in giving primacy to epistemology/ 4 32

Chief representatives of this school are Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnis Problem, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1922); Kant's Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelin and James P. Pettagrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951); Hermann Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 4th ed. (Berlin, 1925), see also Paul Natorp's "Kant und die Marburger Schule", Kant Studien Vol. 17, 1912. 33

For some insightful readings in Neo-Kantianisms, see Henri Dussort L'Ecole de Marbourg, (Paris, 1963); H. L. Ollig, Der_NeuKantianismus (Stuttgart, 1979); Thomas E. Wüley's Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought 1860-1914 (Detroit, 1978); Gerhard Funke, "Der Weg Zur ontologischen Kantinterpretation" in Von der Aktuali-taet Kants, ed. by G. Funkte (Bonn, 1979) and "Erkenntnishtheorie und Logik" in NeuKantianismus, ed. with an introduction by Wernes Flach and Helmut Holzhey (Hildesheim, 1980) also Nicolai Hartmann, "Diesseits von Idealismus und Realismus. Ein Beitrag zur Scheidung des Geschichtlichen und Uebergeschicht-lichen in der Kantischen Philosophie" in Kant-Studien vol. 29 1924. 34

Some English interpreters of Kant with similar tendencies are A. C. Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950); Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1929); H. J. Paton, Kant's Metaphysics of Experience, 2 vols. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1936); W. H. Walsh, Reason and Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947); T. D. Weldon, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958); S. Korner, Kant

Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy

21

Thus, this school draws the conclusion that the bond between knowledge and the object must be established in, and justified through, knowledge itself. Contact with the object is therefore the immanent concern of knowledge, and it is within knowledge that it must be accounted for. The Heidelberg School35 maintained that Kant's philosophy should ultimately be understood in terms of the leitmotif of the second Critique, arguing that Kant's epistemological concerns were subordinated to his ethical concerns. However, what has occurred during the last sixty years in the continuing Kant interpretation is an attempt by Heidegger (and others) 36 to formulate an interpretation of Kant which seeks to go beyond the presuppositions of both contenders in the Marburg-Heidelberg

(London: Harmondsworth, 1955); see also Robert Paul Wolff, ed., Kant, A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday & Co., 1967); T. Penelhem and J. J. Macintosh, eds., The First Critique: Reflections of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Pub. Co., 1969). 35

Typical representatives of this school are Richard Kroner, Von Kant bis Hegel (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1961); Richard Kroner argues that one is Kantian only long enough to discern the contradictions within his thought which go beyond him. All of these stem from that "Urgegensatz" of the critical philosophy, the dualism of noumenal and the phenomenal. "Thus to understand Kant is to go beyond him, in fact to transform him" (1:27, 60 and p. v of second edition Foreword). Also Kant's Weltanschauung, English trans, by John E. Smith with Revision by the Author (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1956); Wilhelm Windelband, Einleitung indie Philosophie (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1914); also Die Philosophie in deutschen des XIX Jahrhunderts (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1909); Heinrich Rickert, Kant: Als Philosophie der Modern Kulture ein Geschichts Philosophischer Versuch (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1924). 36 See also Heinz Heimsoeth, "Metaphysical Motives in the Development of Critical Idealism," in Kant: Disputed Questions ed. Moltke Gram (Chicago: Quadrangle Pub., 1967); also Transzendentale Dielektic, Parts 1-3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1966-69); Gottfried Martin, Immanuel Kant: Ontologie und Wissenschaftstheorie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969); Gerhard Kruger, Philosophie und Moral in der Kantischen Kritik, 2nd ed. (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1967); F. Kaulback, Der Philosophische Begriff der Bewegung (Cologne and Graz: Bohlav, 1965); Friedrick Delekat, Immanuel Kant, 2nd ed. (Heidelberg: Orwell & Meyer, 1966); and O. Bohlav, Die Ontologie Kants (Salzburg and Munich: Pustet, 1967).

22

Overview ofRecent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy

controversy. Heidegger is at one with the Marburg school in his view that the first Critique holds a central position in Kant's writing, but he contests the claim that it is primarily a treatise on epistemology.37 He states quite boldly that the Critique of Pure Reason has nothing to do with a theory of knowledge. For Heidegger, Kant's primary interest resides with ontology, the comprehension of being. The nature of knowledge is to be understood in light of the structure of Being and not the other way around. Therefore, Heidegger rejected the Neo-Kantian conception of Kant in general and the conception of the School of Marburg in particular. The School of Marburg portrayed Kant as the builder of the philosophy of science. But Heidegger posed the central problem of the first Critique in the realm of the metaphysics of man. This positive transfer extricates the critical philosophy from its engagement in science. Now, philosophy does not propose to be a scientific philosophy by being a philosophy of science. It aims at being a radical philosophy by being a fundamental ontology, in other words, a metaphysics of man. Cassirer38 suggests that Kant's first Critique is a treatise on the nature of knowledge and his theory of human nature is an explanation of

Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962). 38

Ernst Cassirer and the Problem of Metaphysics," in Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. M. Gram, pp. 131-57. Cassirer agrees with those who regard as progressive the tendency of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant to replace ontology by epistemology. He approves of Descartes' program to determine the whole domain and limits of the mind but rejects as impossible the Cartesian, and more explicitly, the rationalist attempt at deducing the concrete totality of the mind from a single logical principle. He sees in Kant's epistemology, which conceives the object of experience as the correlate of the synthetic unity of the understanding, a decisive step in the right direction. But he also holds that further progress was made by philosophers like Herder and Von Humbolt in rejecting the limits of epistemology as too narrow and in trying to replace it by a philosophy of culture on the line of his own philosophy of symbolic forms. See especially, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Vol. 1, New Haven (1957) pp. 9 ff. Cassirer with full consciousness extended the transcendental problematic beyond the perimeters of science to the entirefieldof the objectifications of culture.

Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy 23 rational man. Thus, the Critique of Pure Reason is interpreted as belonging to the phenomenology of objects rather than to the phenomenology of the subject. Insofar as any foundations for a metaphysics is laid in the first Critique, it belongs by the very nature of the case to the metaphysics of the science of nature and not the ontology of Dasein. Amidst this controversy, it is important to note that Kant defines metaphysics in a number of ways. For instance, he speaks of metaphysics as a science that is constituted by a priori synthetic propositions.39 By this he means propositions (and principles or categories) that are known to be universal prior to experience. He also speaks of metaphysics as the pursuit of our loftiest concerns, Freedom, God and Immortality. This study will be concerned with Kant's use of metaphysics in the former usage.40 Both Kantian metaphysics and (post-Enlightenment) German ontology intend to treat the most general principles of reality. However, they are not interchangeable because metaphysics understands those principles ontically while the ontology of

Critique of Pure Reason, B 18, p. 54. For Kant, the first and foremost task of metaphysics is to establish the possibility of a priori cognitions about objects. The discovery of a reliable method, whereby credible results analogous to those of science may be achieved in philosophy, can be considered as Kant's lasting legacy. In seeking to delineate what Paton has called a "metaphysics of experience," Kant was defining knowledge in terms of a validity furnished by a priori elements without which there could be no experience at all. 40

Although Kant attributes great importance to his criticism of metaphysics, his Critique also points in another direction - - the systematic unity of reason or the whole vocation of man (B867-68, pp. 657-58). The criticism of metaphysics initiated by the intellectual or historical fact that metaphysics is a battlefield (a battleground peculiarly suited for those who desire to exercise themselves in mock combats (BXV) of controversies where no agreed body of knowledge is reached leads Kant to his systematic attempt to shift the focus of metaphysical concerns from the material or thematic to the level of presuppositions. Because he believes that he establishes that level which is virtually an exploration of the nature of reason, he considers himself justified in moving to the second focus of philosophical exploration, to human ends. These are ends of reason.

24

Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy

Heidegger seeks to portray the source of origin of ontic reality and its structure.41 The controversy between the epistemological and the metaphysical schools 42 of interpretation of Kant's critical philosophy has continued unabated even to the present time. At the center of the polemic is a conscious effort to overcome the radical dualism which seems to be inherent in Kant's philosophical system. In 1962, we have Graham Bird's Kant's Theory of Knowledge, in which he is engaged in a sustained discussion of the thing in itself. Bird proposed that in speaking philosophically of something as a thing-in-itself we are not speaking of a thing that is other than an appearance; we are simply considering the thing no longer from a

The term ontic is used here as a title for a method and for a constellation of categories for reality and for the activity of thinking. For clear referent in the history of ideas, it can be understood as a distillation of the Kantian teachings concerning epistemology and its limits. Ontic, then, refers to the categories, principles, attitudes that constitute Kant's notion of theoretic reason. The most concise statement of this position is to be found in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. To the contents of the "Preface" one must add the discussion entitled the "Second Analogy," also in the second edition. There, Kant postulates the criteria of empirical data, causal determination, and the irreversibility of the temporal succession of events - - according to a rule - - if philosophy is to lead to truth and reality. Kant's most basic concern here is the notion of objectivity or objective validity. He observes that without objectivity (as provided only by the previously listed criteria), an alleged succession of events would degenerate into a "merely subjective play of my fancy" or into a mere dream (Critique of Pure Reason, B247, cf. 240). 42

Many critics and commentators seem to pay little regard to the fact that for Kant, there is no hard and fast distinction between epistemology, metaphysics and science. The metaphysics that is attacked in the Critique especially in the Transcendental Dialectic (i.e., A 462/B 490, A 463/B491) is not metaphysics per se, but dogmatic and illusory metaphysics - metaphysics that attempts to provide knowledge of objects outside of human experience on the basis of mere concepts. The transcendental analytic is not merely an exercise in theory of knowledge; it is, according to Kant, a propaedeutic to a legitimate metaphysics of Nature.

Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy 25 merely empirical perspective, but rather from an epistemic one that is transcendental because it reveals certain a priori components.43 This suggests not only that things in themselves and appearances are ontologically identical, but also that the philosophical considerations of things in themselves are just philosophical considerations of them as things that appear, that is, as terms of knowledge. This approach to Kant obviously would absolve him from the charge of hypostatizing a second world, but by itself it does not give a full explanation of the doctrine of the unknowability of things in themselves, or, of the passages which seem to speak positively about distinguishing things in themselves from appearance. This seems to be the task of John Findlay44 who claims that Kant draws a strict distinction between knowing and thinking. The notion of things in themselves is employed by Kant when he conceives of them as existing independently of whatever we may conceive or believe; the transcendental object is what we have to conceive as being the underlying unknown ground of appearance and experience. The term noumenon is the appropriate designation for an object of a type of awareness not called into action by sensuous affections.45 To the critics who suggest that such entities are meaningless even in Kant's own terms (since they are beyond possible experience and hence unknowable), Findlay suggests that Kant was not inconsistent46 in 43 Graham Bird, Kant's Theory of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; 2nd printing, 1965), pp. 36 ff. 44

J. N. Findlay, Kant and the Transcendental Object, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) 45 46

Ibid., p. 3

George Schrader, in "The Thing in Itself in Kantian Philosophy," in Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Paul Wolff (London: Macmillan, 1968), points out that Kant does not always follow the rules of his critical philosophy. On the side of the object, Kant sometimes refers to the thing in itself as the cause of appearances (p. 173), thus bringing the relationship of the thing in itself and appearances under a purely phenomenal category. Schrader argues that "the concept of the thing in itself as the cause of appearances has nothing whatsoever in common with his critical distinction between appearance and things in themselves" (p. 174). According to Schrader, "the seriousness of Kant's inconsistency is easily seen when one recognizes that, on a critical basis, it is only appearances which are

26

Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy

speaking of such entities. The explanation is "that Kant operates with two conceptions of meaning. The one is epistemological and applies only where intuitive verification and fulfillment are possible, the other, a wider kind of significance, applies even in the case of the necessarily empty reference for we can certainly think of something as qualified in some way or other, or as being related in some way to something else."47 Unfortunately, however, although thing in itself, the noumenon and the transcendental, play a central role in Kant's philosophy, it is hardly in any positive sense,48 because Kant had made the tremendous sacrifice of limiting theoretical knowledge to appearance, he could only appeal to moral faith to save the great thinkables. Arthur Melnick49 in his treatment of-thing-in itself considers it as the notion of a non-epistemic concept of what it is to be an object. It is an alternative conception of what is involved in being an object, "the idea namely of a concept of an object that would have sense apart from any reference to how the experience of a subject hooks up epistemologically to his intellectual judgmental structure."50 Thus, "a thing-in-itself is not a different kind ofthing... but rather a different kind of concept of a

objects" (p. 175). Schrader points out a similar equivocation in Kant's use of the concept of the transcendental object, which he often uses interchangeably with the thing itself. 47

Findlay, Kant and the Transcendental Object, p. 8.

48

The concept of a noumenon in Kant's philosophy is a limiting or negative concept. As Kant puts it, "the concept of a noumenon is thus merely a limiting concept, the function of which is to curb the pretention of sensibility; and it is therefore only of negative employment. At the same time it is no arbitrary invention: it is bound up with the limitation of the sensibility, though it cannot affirm anything positive beyond the field of sensibility" (A 255/B 310-11). Since humans are endowed only with sensible intuition, and since the sensibility is the basis of all knowledge of existing things, the problematical concept of the noumenon plays no role in that knowledge. 49

Arthur Melnick, Kant's Analogies of Experience (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973). 'Ibid., p. 152.

Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy 27 thing".51 In fact, "it is the notion of a concept quite literally incomprehensible to us."52 Since for Melnick we find on analysis that the notion of an object must necessarily be related to our form of knowing, it is claimed that the notion of an object independent of such a relation is an absurdity. For, if we had an intuition of an object, then we would have to be epistemically related to it, and so it would not be fully independent of us „ and could not be a thing-in-itself. There are those who have expressed views quite similar to Mebick's, although their interpretations are not worked out in as much detail. Rolf Meerbote,53 for example, has held that "to say things in themselves are unknowable is . . . merely to say that.. . objects in order to be known must satisfy particular conditions of knowledge."54 Thus, to call spatio-temporal objects appearances in a transcendental sense means no more and no less than that objects in order to be knowable must be subsumable under particular a priori conditions. Jonathan Bennett, expressing similar views as those mentioned above, claims that "a thing-in-itself is roughly a thing considered independently of any facts about how it might impinge upon our experience."55 He is more willing, however, to concede that at least sometimes Kant uses the term thing-in-itself as if it is a consistent notion of something that is really distinct from appearance. Bennett insists, however, that Kant has no business using any such notion. This he considers "is a betrayal," for Kant has no right to make agnostic or negative uses of phrases such as real in itself.56

51

Ibid., p. 154

52

Ibid., p. 152

53 Rolf Meerbote, "The Unknowability of Things-in-Themselves, Proceedings of the Third International Congress, ed. L. W. Beck (Dortrecht: Reidel, 1972). 54

Ibid., p. 147

"Jonathan Bennett, Kant's Dialectic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 51.

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Overview ofRecent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy

Generally speaking, the transcendental distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves seems one of the most (if not the most) controversial issue in Kant's critical philosophy. By the term transcendental I mean the deduction of all cognition from the a priori obtainable fundamental forms of consciousness as such. There are those who try to "bridge the gap" by asserting that although for Kant there are not two objects involved, there are still two transcendental and intelligible points of view that are involved in his doctrine of things in themselves and appearance. Such an interpretation is expressed in the works of H. E. Allison and Gerold Prauss.57 Prauss thinks that within the framework of Kant's philosophy the expression thing-in-itself can be understood in two distinctly different senses.58 Prauss claims Kant's whole thesis is keyed to two aspects of reflection: upon things as phenomena and upon the very same things "in themselves." Richard Aquila, in his attempt to allow Kant to remain a two-object theorist, rejects the double aspect interpretation by emphasizing Kant's talk of the causal relation between phenomena and noumena and by arguing that since things-in-themselves are non-spatial, phenomena and nemine cannot be the same thing.59 Aquila eventually decided to opt for a phenomenalistic reading of Kant's doctrine of things in themselves.60

H. E. Allison, "Things in Themselves, Noumena, and the Transcendental Object," Dialectica 32 (1978) : 41-76; also Kant's Transcendental Idealism : An Interpretation and Defence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 14-114; H. E. Mathews, "Strawson on Transcendental Idealism," Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1969) : 204-20; Gerold Prauss, Kant und das Problem der Dinge an Sich Bonn: Bouvier, 1974); see also W. H. Walsh, "Kant's Transcendental Idealism," in Kant on Causality, Freedom and Objectivity, ed. William Harper and Rolf Meerbote (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1984), pp. 83-96. 58

Prauss, Kant und das Problem der Dinge an Sich, pp. 20ff.

59

Richard E. Aquila, "Things in Themselves and Appearances: Intentionality and Reality in Kant," Archiv für Geschichte Philosophie 61 (1979): 300. 60 Richard Aquila, Representational Mind (Bloomington: University Press, 1983), p. 93.

Indiana

Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy 29

t

The other theme which I will discuss is the transcendental deduction. This has been generally interpreted along certain traditional lines. P. F. Strawson,61 Jonathan Bennett62 and Barry Stroud63 are among those who seem to have common assumptions about Kant's aim in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. Strawson's Bounds of Sense64 has widely been assumed to define what Kant was trying to do. This idea is that 'a transcendental deduction is to be read as a direct response to Humean skepticism and that to some extent, starting from a very weak premise of something like the fact that we are conscious beings, Kant's main aim is to establish that there is an objective realm.65 Peter Strawson attributes the following thesis to Kant: that experience is essentially temporal, that there must be such unity among a temporally extended set of experiences as to make self-ascription on the part of a subject of experience possible, that experience must include P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966). 62 Jonathan Bennett, Kant's Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). 63

Barry Stroud, "Transcendental Arguments," Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 241-56. Strawson, Bennett, and Stroud all understand Kant as having assumed our possession of substantial mathematical and scientific knowledge. However, others like D. P. Dryer (Kant's Solution for Verification in Metaphysics [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966]) and Robert Paul Wolff (Kant's_Theory of Mental Activity [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963]) believe that Kant actually sought to establish the a priori validity of the categories, beginning merely with the fact of consciousness. 64

For instance,. Bennett claims that Strawson is one of the very few who has mastered the entire interconnections of the Critique of Pure Reason. He said Strawson's "sorting of wheat from chaff has been almost absolutely right and soundly defended . . . his intimacy with transcendental idealism has engendered understanding and almost sympathy, but no tolerance" (J. Bennett, "Strawson on Kant, Philosophical Review 7 [1968] : 340). John Findlay has also expressed exceptional tribute to Strawson. See Findlay, Kant and the Transcendental Object, pp. 377-83. 65

Richard Rorty has provided an excellent account of Strawson's central argument in The Bounds of Sense. See Rorty, "Strawson's Objectivity Argument," Review of Metaphysics 24 (1970) : 208-44.

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Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy

an awareness of objects that can be judged irrespective of the actual occurrence of particular experiences of them; that the object thus judged must be spatial, that there must be one unified spatio-temporal framework of empirical reality embracing all experience and its objects, and that certain principles of permanence and causality must be satisfied in the physical or objective world of things in space.66 Strawson's purpose is to derive a modernized version of Kant's thesis about objectivity, space and time, substance and causation from the most minimal assumption about the temporality and conceptualization of our experience.67 Of all the books written on Kant in recent times, Dieter Henrich's Identität und Objektivität is undoubtedly the most exciting. Henrich's discussion is centered around two central ideas in Kant's transcendental deduction, namely objectivity and self-consciousness. Whereas Heidegger seems to be engaged in an ontological war with Kant69 and Strawson out rightly rejects Kant's Transcendental idealism as incoherent, Henrich tries to bring into a synthesis those two principal proofs of the Critique discussed in the Transcendental Deduction, the one demonstrating the possibility of a systematic knowledge of experience, and the other, the impossibility of knowledge beyond the limit of experience. These arguments are, without doubt, absolutely central to the Transcendental Deduction. Kant himself considered this theory completely new and extremely complicated; indeed, Kant conceded that he had great difficulty in working out a satisfactory exposition of his theory. The content of Heidegger's program seems to constitute a roll-call of the rejection or transformation of the components of Kant's transcendental turn in philosophical methodological thinking. One of the main objectives is to refute Kant's insistence upon a two-termed epistemic Strawson, Bound of Sense, p. 24. 67

Ibid.

58 Dieter Henrich, Identitaet und Objektivitaet (Heidelberg: Winter Universitatsverlag, 1976). 69

M. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics; also Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy

t

31

correlation for truth, reality and knowledge. For Heidegger, what Kant defines as the task of transcendental philosophy is really nothing but the working out of the ontological determination of a certain realm of beings or even of every possible domain of beings, and thus an elaboration of the regional ontologies. Thus, The Critique of Pure Reason is an attempt to lay the foundation of metaphysics taken as a science. It constitutes in some sense the foundation of the science of Being. It is the transcendental foundation of ontology. Heidegger employs the analysis of cognition to disclose the finitude in man and the Dasein in man.70 His intention therefore is not really to analyze man, but to analyze being through man. This is why he can say: "If man is only man on the basis of the Dasein in him, then the question as to what is more primordial than man can, as a matter of principle, not be an anthropological one. All anthropology even philosophical anthropology, always proceeds on the assumption that man is man." ' For Kant, Being remains transcendent, and thus is not a presupposition of his transcendental philosophy. Kant does not accept Being as the frame of reference, then set out to determine through a transcendental analysis what he can know with respect to those aspects of Being not identical with man. Rather he begins a transcendental analysis, determines thereby what man can know, and what this knowledge implies in practice. One of the fundamental principles of The Critique of Pure Reason is the recognition that the content and purpose of philosophy are determined by the capacity which man has for experience. Whereas interpreters like Peter Strawson and Jonathan Bennett have represented the transcendental deduction as basically aiming to establish objectivity, i.e., to show that one can be self-conscious only if there is an objective world of which one is aware the interpretation which I shall present here takes Kant essentially to be arguing that for us there is objectivity and hence empirical knowledge only if the categories are universally valid. Thus, there are no conceivable objects to be known by us without the categories. Categories are therefore objectively

Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics p. 237. 71

Ibid., p. 237-238.

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necessary for all knowledge of objects.72 By means of the categories I can anticipate experience, that is, the law to the objects of this experience. The deduction of the categories thus shows how the very possibility of experience is constituted a priori by the operations of the understanding. The categories are such concepts which can be shown to be true of their objects either a priori or not at all. The propositions in which the categories function as predicates have, if any, a universal and necessary validity for their objects. If the only possible candidates for these objects are the objects of experience, the deduction of the categories must prove that the objects of experience are possible only if the categories are valid of things or, as Dieter Henrich has insisted, the Deduction shows that self-conscious experience must be thoroughly governed by rules - -categorical rules.73 But how does a transcendental principle demonstrate that independent objects exist and actually conform to the requirement of the categorical scheme? Note that this skeptical challenge construes the problem in terms of proving that a subjectively necessary conceptual apparatus corresponds to the characteristics of utterly distinct pre-existent objects. If the transcendental deduction is to succeed, Kant needs an argument by which the above formulation of the skeptical paradigm will become obsolete. What the argument needs is a way of making a logical connection between the cognitive conditions of knowledge and the concept of an object in general. It needs to show that there can be no consideration of the objects independent of the condition of our knowing them. And what is important to consider, is that this requirement cannot be merely a postulate or assumption that is thus imposed on the skeptical 72 Albert Einstein recognizing the importance of the categorial concepts said: "The theoretical attitude here advocated is distinct from that of Kant only by the fact that we do not conceive of the 'categories' as unalterable (conditioned by the nature of the understanding but as {in the logical sense} free conventions). They appear to be a priori only in so far as thinking without the positing of categories and concepts in general would be impossible as breathing in a vacuum (Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., Albert Einstein Philosopher-Scientist (Evanston, 111.: The Library of Living Philosophers, Inc., 1949, p. 667).

"Dieter Henrich, Identitaet und Objektivitaet (Heidelberg: Winter Universitates verlag, 1976). pp. 108 ff.

Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy 33 paradigm, but rather, must be a part of an entirely different epistemological paradigm. If this can be provided, then the kind of epistemological gap between subjective necessity and objective validity will be closed. For Kant, the required paradigm is provided by the fundamental orientation of the critical philosophy, namely, what Kant called "the Copernican Revolution in philosophy."74 The revolution in the empirical part of natural science closely resembles the one in geometry; and Kant describes it in similar terms. A revelation came to the early practitioners of the experimental method. They grasped that reason has insight only into that which it creates in accordance with its own plan and that it must not allow itself to be tied by nature's tether, but prove with principles of judgment based on fixed laws, constraining nature to answer its questions. Reason with its principles on the one hand, according to which alone corresponding appearances can be admitted as equivalent to laws, and on the other hand, its experiment that it has devised in conformity with these principles, must approach nature to be taught by it. However, not with the attitude of a pupil, but of a judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he or she has formulated.75 Nature has much to teach us which we cannot work out for ourselves, yet our inquiring into those mysteries must conform to what nature gets from us. It was this insight that put physics on the high road of a science.76 But why should nature obey? Why should the connectedness between things and processes exemplifying just those types of linkage which put together my sensory experience as mine be done by the categories? How do the categories relate to intuition? The relation between our representations and their objects, Kant concludes, is neither wholly active nor wholly passive. In the case of human as contrasted with either a wholly receptive or wholly creative understanding, the important and difficult problem is to explain the conformity of representations and their objects, to explain the possibility of objective knowledge. Kant proceeds to find a solution to this problem by first

Critique of Pure Reason, B xvii- B xviii, p. 10, A 126, p. 148. Ibid. B xiii, p. 10. 'Ibid., Bxiv, p. 10.

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indicating that it is beyond controversy that knowledge and its object must agree. What he disputes is the source of this agreement. Previously, men assumed that knowledge must conform to objects. Instead, he supposes that objects conform to knowledge. To say that objects conform to our knowledge is to say that they conform to the condition under which we alone represent them as objects. In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant points out that the construction of concepts upon which mathematics depends for its precision and universal validity is possible only in an intuition which it presents a priori and "in which whatever follows from the universal conditions of the construction must be universally valid of the object of the concept thus constructed."77 For arithmetic, it is the intuition of time.78 It follows from this that geometry and arithmetic refer "to no other objects than those of the senses."79 However, what is given us through the senses are only sense impressions rather than objects. In order to be able to speak of objects at all, it is necessary to subsume the manifold of sense impressions under the unity of concepts. In order for this to be done we need the function of the understanding.80 What such subsumption amounts to is that we take qualities and configuration which are merely associated with one another in our sense impressions as combined in the object. In other words, we take their relations as objectively valid.81 The combining of sense impressions themselves "must conform to the conditions under which alone they can stand together in one universal self-consciousness because otherwise they would not without exception belong to me."82 Hence the unity of consciousness "is the principle of the original synthetic unity of apperception,"83 and this is "an objective condition of all knowledge."84

Ibid.,A716/B744. ''Prolegomena to any future Metaphysics, p. 30.

Critique of Pure Reason, A 51/B75. 'Ibid., B 142. 2

Ibid., B132,p. 153.

13

Ibid., B 137.

Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy 35 If the object of experience results from a subsumption of the sensory manifold under concept, then Kant maintains, the conditions which make our experience of objects possible must also be the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience.85 This means that the understanding itself must contain the forms not of some particular object, but of object in general.86 The condition under which alone an object in general can be thought are the categories of the understanding. Their objective validity rests upon "the fact that, so far as the form of thought is concerned, through them alone does experience become possible . . . [and] only by means of them can any object whatsoever of experience be thought."87 For Kant, knowledge depends on the unity of a thinking subject, and the categories are "rules for an understanding whose whole power consists in thought, consists . . . in the act whereby it brings the synthesis of a manifold, given to it from elsewhere in intuition, to the unity of apperception."88 Hence, to apply a category is to unify given sense impressions and to confer upon them an objective reference.89 The categories themselves are merely forms of thought which obtain reality in their application. This application is possible in the figurative synthesis which Kant calls the transcendental imagination and is the result of the action of the understanding upon what is given to us in sense impressions. From the above considerations, Kant argued for the highest principle of synthetic judgments which states that the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the

'Ibid., B 138.

'Ibid., A 93, A 108, A 51/B 75. 'lbid.,A93/B 126. 'Ibid., B 145, p. 161. 'Ibid., A 79/B 104 ff.

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objects of experience and for this reason they have objective validity in a synthetic judgment a priori.90 The content of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is a transcendental knowledge. This, within the limits of theoretical reason, is a knowledge which transcends our empirical knowledge as regards the conditions of its possibility. However, this is not to say Transcendental Philosophy is not fully concrete both in its intentions and its achievements. Kant determines that the formal aspects of experience are void without the contact provided by sensory intuition, and that in its widest employment the knowledge attained by speculative reason can never extend beyond the limits of possible experience. It should also be noted that Kant explicitly denies that he has provided a full system of transcendental philosophy in the Critique of Pure Reason?1 However, he assures us that the first Critique contains "all that is essential in transcendental Philosophy," and that it is "the complete idea of transcendental philosophy."92 Consequently, transcendental philosophy will extend beyond the First Critique but will always be determined by the transcendental account of experience provided by that work.93

'Ibid., A158/B 197. Ibid., A 13-14/B 27-28.

It is the task of transcendental method to account for the possibility of an activity of reason. In this method of thinking exists a specific procedure of thought by means of which we can identify and reconstruct those a priori presuppositions that may be thought of as forming the basis of rational human acting and knowing. The transcendental method is necessary because of the fact that the human person's interest as a rational being cannot be satisfied merely by engaging in rational activity, but he must be able, in addition, to affirm that his activity is grounded in reason. In other words, the task of transcendental method is to understand those essential elements by which a person proves himself or herself to be endued with reason. In the Critique of Pure Reason the fundamental elements to be understood were mathematical and empirical knowledge. But Kant did not stop there. Just as the scope and limit of human knowledge is grasped in the Critique of Pure Reason so is the moral will in the Critique of Practical Reason. It is grasped as autonomy. Here morality is understood (grasped) in such a manner that freedom is thought to be its unconditioned condition, that is, the moral will is

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37

It is primarily for this reason that I find it difficult to accept Heidegger's interpretation of Kant's program in the first Critique, primarily his claim that: the Critique of Pure Reason is completely misunderstood . . . if this work is interpreted as a theory of experience . . . perhaps as a theory of the positive sciences. The Critique of Pure Reason has nothing to do with a theory of knowledge. However, if one could admit the interpretation of the work as a theory of knowledge, it would be necessary to say that the Critique is not a theory of ontic knowledge but of ontological. But even this interpretation although far removed from the usual interpretation of the aesthetic and transcendental analytic, does not touch upon what is essential in the Critique.94 For Heidegger, what Kant defines as the task of transcendental philosophy is really nothing but the working out of the ontological determination of a certain domain of beings or even of every possible domain of beings and thus an elaboration of the regional ontologies. In a sense transcendental philosophy does determine general ontology since it defines the conditions which are common to the mental entities (psychology and physical entities, cosmology). 95 Therefore, what Heidegger calls "fundamental ontology" can be seen as equivalent to Kant's procedure of working out the elements of transcendental philosophy. However, the Critique of Pure Reason is not the transcendental foundations of ontology as such, nor is it "the disclosure of the essence of transcendence. 96

comprehended as that will whose first and only commandment is to determine itself through pure reason. This transcendental deduction of the moral law not only entails ascribing freedom to the human person as a quality of his or her will but also that in understanding the individual's morality as founded on freedom, he/she posits himself or herself as free. 94

Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 21.

95

Ibid., 123-129.

Ibid., p. 129. See also Phänomenologische Interpretation Von Kants Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (1927-1928).

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Heidegger's main point of view in this inquiry is the finite nature of reason. This, he believes, is expressed by Kant especially in the view that knowledge is primarily intuition. Heidegger's interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason discloses the essential finitude of knowledge which is basically intuitive. He explains the function of transcendental imagination as that in which both understanding and sensibility lay their own foundations. However, Heidegger fails to preserve Kant's distinction between transcendental philosophy and metaphysics. For Kant, transcendental philosophy is identified with ontology97 and both are said to teach us only the conditions of the possibility of experience. Metaphysics as a total system will naturally include98 these conditions, but also much more. Therefore, it can still be distinguished from both transcendental philosophy and ontology, since they consider only the formal aspects of cognition, whereas metaphysics considers the material. For Kant, transcendental philosophy has a double function. It restricts the claim of knowledge to the field of possible experience; on the other hand, it provides justification of the use of concepts as having objective reality inside this sphere. Kant graphically expresses this double aspect of transcendental philosophy in the Doctrine of Method." There, the traditional metaphysician is metaphorically described as a geographer who has not learned that the earth is a spheroid, but takes the naive view that the earth is a plane infinitely extended in all directions. Once you have learned that the surface of the earth is spherical, you know that the extension of this sphere depends on the diameter of the sphere, and from measuring the curvature of even a small part of this surface you can, by simple calculation deduce the size of the sphere. Kant compares Reason to such a sphere; the field of knowledge is represented by our planet in this picture. To state this metaphorically, the measure of the curvature of the surface of reason is determined by synthetic propositions a priori. This, and only this, makes it possible to determine the extension of possible empirical knowledge.

Critique of Pure Reason, A 845/ B 873.

'Ibid., A 759/B 787-A763/B791.

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Indeed Kant believes that there is a unity to reason and that our theoretical intentions are unthinkable apart from an active orientation of the knowing subject. In the transcendental deduction, he has shown the possibility of the categories of a priori modes of knowledge of object of an intuition in general. The Critique of Pure Reason as a whole undertakes (among other things) to demarcate the realms of human knowledge, to delineate the realms to which it cannot go, and to determine the limits of its possibility. Although Kant's critical philosophy seems to be dealing primarily with a theory of human experience, and experience for Kant is closely connected with empirical knowledge, his theory is not merely an epistemology nor merely a "metaphysics of knowledge." Actually, Kant's critical philosophy is neither an epistemology nor a fundamental ontology. Kant recognizes the probability of fault in his systems, and that it "may therefore be opened to objections in this or that respect, while yet the structure of the system, taken in its unity, is not in the least endangered."100 But he warns against what will happen if we neglect the structure of the system taken in its unity (= the architectonic). "If we take single passages, torn from their contexts and compare them with one another, apparent contradictions are not likely to be lacking."101 Kant's criticism of philosophy as it applied to traditional metaphysics is an attempt to bring into prominence two interrelated features of metaphysics, one being its pretence and the other being the outcome or the failure ofthat pretence. Since metaphysics attempts to transcend the limits of experience, the principles suggested by metaphysics are no longer subject to any empirical test. In Kant's criticism of metaphysics the central point is the applicability of a priori synthetic judgments in the sphere of knowledge. These are present in mathematics and in pure natural science, but are not present in metaphysics. Mathematics and natural science are not taken as a matter of principle by Kant as representing a paradigm of valid knowledge. Kant saw it as his task to render mathematics and pure natural sciences comprehensible. They serve as a model merely because they base thenknowledge on synthetic a priori principles. These principles taken as

'Ibid., B XLIV, p. 37. Ibid., B xvii.

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criteria of validity are then comparatively applied to metaphysics on the one hand and mathematics and natural science on the other. For Kant, the revolution in the empirical part of natural science closely resembles the one in Geometry. Given the impressive results achieved in logic, mathematics, and natural science Kant is dismayed by the present state of metaphysics.102 Thus he is motivated to carry out a revolutionary change in metaphysics - - that is to show that "reason has insight only into that which it creates in accordance with its own plan." Kant understands the first Critique as offering a theory of experience in the form of a grounding of the possibility of any experience of object in general in such a way that it answers the question: Is metaphysics as a scientific philosophy possible? In the critical philosophy this question is identical with the question whether there are propositions which are synthetic and a priori and yield transcendental knowledge. Therefore, that there are necessary conditions of any possible experience of objects in general is in fact inherent in Kant's answer to the very questions whether and how metaphysics as a systematic discipline is possible. This is the question that inaugurated Kant's Copernican turn in philosophy. In the remainder of this study I will present some of the major features of this novel and revolutionary way of philosophy and show why this epoch making event is still relevant today.

102

In the first half of the section, Bvii-xv, Kant analyses bodies of knowledge that have already become scientific and in the second half, Bxvxxiv, he applies the result of this analysis, by means of an argument by analogy, to metaphysics.

Chapter Three SYNTHETIC A PRIORI JUDGMENTS From a philosophical point of view, the concept of synthetic a priori judgment may be considered, according to Kant, as the most important of all kinds of propositions. He considered himself the first philosopher to introduce this concept.103 Kant says in the Introduction that the whole problem which the Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to solving can be epitomized in the question: How are a priori synthetic judgments possible. 104 He further states: "We shall understand by a priori knowledge, not knowledge which is independent of this or that experience, but knowledge absolutely independent of all experience." 105 Judgments which are Kant acknowledges that some of his predecessors, the most significant of these being Locke, Leibniz and Crusius came close to discovering the distinction between synthetic a priori and analytic judgments. However, he consistently maintained his articulation of this distinction as quite original. He claimed that prior to the Critique "this manner of considering judgment has never been properly conceived." The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, ed. and trans., Henry E. Allison, Baltimore and London, John Hopkins University Press, 1973, p. 154. 104

There is an ongoing debate on the originality and significance of Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgment. See especially John Pollock, Knowledge and Justification (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), chapter 10; R. G. Swinburne, "Analyticity, Necessary and A Priority," Mind 84 (1975) : 2-43; Edward Eerwin, "Are the Notions A Priori Truth and Necessary Truth Extensionally Equivalent?" Canadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1974) : Philip Kitcher, "A priori Knowledge," The Philosophical Review 84 (1980) : 3-23; Saul Kripke, "Identity and Necessity," in Identity and Individualism, ed. Milton K. Munitz (New York, 1971)), pp. 135-64. For a comprehensive discussion of the analytic/synthetic distinction, see Analyticity: Selected Readings, ed. with an introduction by James F. Harris, Jr., and Richard H. Severens (Chicago: Quadrangle Books), 1970. 'Critique of Pure Reason, A B 2-3, p. 43.

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absolutely a priori are marked by an absolute necessity and strict universality,106 and since these two features are inseparable, either alone will serve to identify such a judgment. Necessity and strict universality are thus sure criteria of a priori knowledge, and are inseparable from one another.107 According to Kant, our ideas a priori are made by ourselves. The mental act by which they are made is an example of what Kant calls synthesis. Thus we are introduced into the Kantian theoretical philosophy by the statement that both mathematics and physics rest on synthetic judgments a priori. A priori is a predicate which Kant applies to all kinds of ideas and mental acts, like intuitions, concepts and judgments. He defines a cognition to be a priori if it takes place independently of all experience.108 There are two connected criteria for a cognition (or knowledge) a priori: Experience teaches us facts but not necessities. A judgment which is thought in strict universality is a judgment a priori}09 For Kant, a priori ideas are not innate, they are made. However, our ability to make them is innate. Ideas a priori are not earlier in time than ideas a posteriori, but they are earlier in validity. Philosophical reflection shows them to be preconditions for the truth of judgments a posteriori. It is only because objects of experience must conform to the constitution of our minds that we can have the sort of a priori knowledge of the

One persistent criterion of knowledge which is affirmed throughout the Critique of Pure Reason is 'universality.' The only assertions, or propositions which qualify as knowledge, according to Kant, are always the case, or true without qualification. As such, they have a necessity which Kant accounts for in the Critique. Kant insists that absolute universality is a condition for science and a feature of a priori sources of knowledge. The premise with which Kant begins his analysis of experience is that experiences are subject to conditions a priori to which their synthesis must always conform. In other words, there is one mind, and since its structure is a priori, there is one structure which is common to every instance of knowledge. xm

Critique ofPure Reason, B 4, p. 44.

108

Ibid., B 3 p. 43.

109 Ibid. B 3-4, pp. 43-44. Strict universality means no exception to the rule is allowed.

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nature of experience which is demonstrated in outline in the Critique itself. Experience tells us, indeed, what is, but not that it must necessarily be so, and not otherwise. It therefore gives us no true universality. . . . First, then, if we have a proposition which is being thought as necessary, it is an a priori judgment, and if, besides, it is not derived from any proposition except one which also has the validity of a necessary judgment, it is an absolutely a priori judgment.110 This passage makes two related points. First, the necessity of genuine a priori judgments is never merely relative to other judgments not themselves necessary; rather, it must be absolute or intrinsic. For example, the necessity of judgments like 7 + 5 = 12 is in no way dependent on contingent judgments, but can and must be known in complete independence of all experience. In other words, a judgment is absolutely necessary if it can and must be known with absolutely no recourse to particular experience. One corollary of this is that necessary truths can never be empirically disconfirmed. Therefore, necessity and strict universality, says Kant, are the sure criteria of a priori knowledge. The context clearly implies that necessity and universality are entailed by a priority as well as entailing it. Kant also distinguishes between logical necessity and the necessity which is a criterion for a priority-factual or material necessity. The former, Kant calls subjective necessity, and the latter, objective necessity. Objective necessity is that which is concerned with the determination or knowledge of objects, whereas subjective necessity is that which is felt or thought or realized by the subject. Therefore, the necessity felt by us in admitting the truth of a conclusion once we admit the truth of the premises is a subjective necessity. For instance, if we are to remain rational, we must regard ourselves as subject to the principle of contradiction.

'Ibid., A 2/B 2, pp. 42-43.

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Admitting the premises and rejecting the conclusion violate this principle. The example given above (7 + 5 = 12)111 is demonstration of material necessity. Material necessity is the opposite of contingency, and Kant contrasts a priori judgments of mathematics and physics with contingent judgments of perception, and the above mathematical example is not contingent. Had it been a contingent proposition, its falsehood would be possible. Kant held that the question of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgment emerges as the central problem of metaphysics as soon as the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments is properly drawn. He thus points to the failure of past philosophers to recognize this problem as evidence of their failure to make the distinction. No such claim, however, is made for the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. The key issue between the a priori and a posteriori judgments is the role of experience in their legitimization. A priori judgments are grounded independently of experience, while a posteriori judgments are grounded by means of an appeal to experience. Following Leibniz,112 Kant regards necessity and universality as the criteria for the a priori. His fundamental assumption is that the truth 11 'For an interesting discussion of Kant's claim that arithmetical propositions are synthetic, see Hector Neri Castaneda's article "7 + 5 = 12 as a Synthetic Proposition," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 21 (September 1960-June 1961): 141-58. 112

However, Kant differs from Leibniz in his main assumptions. For Leibniz and many other Cartesians, the model for knowing is seeing. "The criterion of truth is nothing other than vision" (Leibniz, Philosophical Schriften Hildershein [Olms, 1960], 4:328). Leibniz holds that our mind possesses dispositions to produce ideas which can be the genuine essence of things. This correspondence is guaranteed by the principle of "Pre-established Harmony." Leibniz' detailed theory of conceptual analysis is developed from Descartes' doctrine of clear and distinct ideas, and is found in the Nouveau Essais and in Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas. Leibniz says that: "When a concept is very complex, we certainly cannot think simultaneously of all the concepts which compose it. But when this is possible, or at least insofar as it is possible, I call the knowledge intuitive. There is no other knowledge than intuitive of distinct primitive concept, while for the most part we have only symbolic knowledge of composites. This already shows that we do not perceive the ideas of those things which we know distinctly except insofar as we use intuitive thought" (Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, Vol. 1, trans, and ed. Leroy E. Loemaker [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956], p. 450).

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value of judgments which lay claim to universality and necessity cannot be grounded empirically but transcendentally, that is, it must be explicated by a logic of the activity of reason. In another example of the analytic/synthetic distinction, Kant draws a contrast between the judgment, all bodies are extended, and the judgment, all bodies have weight. Describing the first as analytic, and the second as synthetic, he says of the first: That a body is extended is a proposition that holds a priori and is not empirical. For, before appealing to experience, I have already in the concept of body all the conditions required for my judgment. I have only to extract from it, in accordance with the principle of contradiction, the required predicate, and in so doing can at the same time become conscious of the necessity of the judgment.113 The truth value of analytic judgments is determined by means of an analysis of the constituent marks of a given concept. This is true even when the concept is empirical. The real question is whether it is likewise possible for synthetic judgments to have non-empirical grounds. Since they are synthetic, they cannot have a purely conceptual or logical grounding; since they are known a priori, they cannot be grounded in experience. The problem of the synthetic a priori is, therefore, that of explaining how it is possible to extend one's knowledge

Kant admits conceptual analysis, yet he is opposed to Leibniz in fundamental respects. Kant rejects the doctrines of pre-established harmony and innate ideas. Kant also rejects intellectual intuition and puts in its place the notion of judging. He realized that the rejection of intellectual intuition and the knowing as seeing model constituted a major decision for his philosophy. In his late essay, On a Newly Elevated Elegant Style in Philosophy, he named Plato as the source of all philosophy which rests on direct insight and intellectual intuition. Against this sort of philosophy, he allies himself with Aristotle on the side of real intellectual work, not delusive shortcuts. In Kant's thinking, the only way in which one could make sense of insight into things in themselves would be to claim a mystical access to God as the creator of all things. xn

Critique ofPure Reason, B 11-12, p. 49.

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Judgments

beyond a given concept independently of any experience of the object thought through that concept.1 H Whether synthetic judgments can be made or become analytic has long been a controversial issue, and there have been many discussions of the distinction upon which it turns. One of the best treatments of the problem of analytic judgment, as it relates to Kant, is Beck's "Can Kant's Synthetic Judgment be Made Analytic?"" 5 Beck distinguishes between a logical and a phenomenological criterion of analytic judgment. The logical one is that the judgment follows from the principle of contradiction, whereas "the phenomenological criterion is the issue of an inspection of what is found introspectively to be really thought in the concept of the subject though we have seen that what is 'really thought' is said to be a definition."116 In Kant's theory, processes of pure intuition are supposed to yield a priori mathematical knowledge. For example, we are supposed to gain a priori mathematical knowledge of the elementarily of triangle by using our grasp of the concept of triangle. It should be noted that Hume called attention to the fact that a relation of ideas differs in principle from a relation of matters of fact. Since for Hume knowledge must be based upon necessary connections, the only field in which the mind can possibly attain certainty is in the field of the relation of ideas. Since relations of matters of fact lack this character of necessity, our knowledge pertaining to this field of experience, is deprived of all grounds for a claim to certainty. The problem which Hume raises here is simply that concerning the objective validity of the conceptual order of the mind. If one desires to defend a claim to certainty in knowledge pertaining to matters of fact, it is incumbent upon him or her to show how the mind can impose its concepts upon matters of fact or the 'given of experience' in such a manner as to guarantee that conceptual necessity will govern the given. He must show how the relation between the ideas of the mind and matters of fact can be so interpreted as to furnish a solid ground on the basis of which the necessity which admittedly holds for relation of ideas can be guaranteed to hold in the mind's conceptual dealings with matters of fact. This is essentially the problem of the a priori. Kant attempted to solve Hume's problem by trying to show how, at least, in the realm of mathematics and the exact sciences, synthetic propositions a priori are possible. U5

Lewis White Beck, "Can Kant's Synthetic Judgments Be Made Analytic?" in Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Paul Wolff (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1967), pp. 3-22. 'Ibid., pp. 8-9.

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Beck's central aim is to project the view that Kant's analytic/synthetic distinction among judgments is neither arbitrary nor variable. In particular, he wants to answer the charge that synthetic judgments can evolve into analytic judgments through changes in their subject concepts. Such an answer will do much, he feels, to undermine the conventionalist thesis that how we divide judgments into analytic and synthetic is a matter of arbitrary decision. Kant regards his distinction between analytic and synthetic judgment as constituting the first step forward in metaphysics since the time of Leibniz and Wolff. Its importance lay in the fact that it permitted him to ask, for the first time, how there can be synthetic a priori judgments. As indicated already, mathematics provided Kant with the most obvious case of synthetic a priori knowledge,117 and it seems reasonable, therefore, that any account of analytic judgments which claims faithfulness to Kant should preserve his finding that mathematical judgments are synthetic. The apriority of mathematics is also demonstrated by its constructive method. Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concept; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts. To construct a concept means to exhibit a priori the intuition which corresponds to the concept. For the construction of a concept we therefore need a non-empirical intuition. The latter must, as intuition, be a single object, and yet non the less, as the construction of a concept (a universal representation), it must in its representation express universal validity for all possible intuitions which fall under the same concept. Thus I construct a triangle by representing the object which corresponds to this concept either by imagination alone, in pure intuition, or in accordance therewith also on paper, in empirical intuition - - in both cases completely a priori, without having borrowed the pattern from experience.118

nl

Critique ofPure Reason, B 14-17.

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Constructive method is a means of determining whether an object corresponds to a concept: for example, the concept of a two-sided enclosed figure and what facts may be true about such concepts. The important element that the constructive method introduces into mathematics is a concept that arises as a function of the self-motivated thinking activity of the mathematician which he brings to space and time for the construction of an object so that he can determine whether it has a reference, and, if so, what its properties are. Thus Kant holds that in properly mathematical activity men play an active role as self-motivated formulators of the concepts and propositions to be constructed. This theory of the self-formulated a priori concept and proposition in geometry provides an element over which men have complete control and the content of which they therefore can be certain. Kant claims119 that the proposition that all bodies are impenetrable is analytic, whereas the proposition that all bodies have weight is synthetic. However, many philosophers have found it difficult to distinguish between the two propositions, while others have claimed that the reason for the difficulty is that, in the final analysis, there is really no difference to be grasped. Thus, as early as in the late nineteenth century, Edward Caird said that "all judgments are synthetic in the making and analytic when made."120 Both Jaakko Hintikka121 and Erick Stenius122 agree that some mathematical truths and numerical truths are synthetic in some sense, and both defend Kant's intuitions on this point. However, they also agree that there is also a sense in which these truths are analytic. Norman Kemp Smith argues that: . . .there is little difficulty in detecting the synthetic character of the proposition, all bodies are heavy. Yet the reader has been first uy

Ibid., B 12.

120

Edward Caird, The Critical Philosophy of Kant, (Glasgow, 1889), p.

269. 121

Jaakko Hintikka, "Are Logical Truths Analytic?" Philosophical Review 74(1965): 178-203. I22 Erick Stenius, "Are True Numerical Statements Analytic or Synthetic?" Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 357-72.

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required to admit the analytic character of the proposition: all bodies are extended. The two propositions are really identical in character. Neither can be recognized as true save in terms of a comprehensive theory of physical existence.123 If the Critique was written, as Kant claimed, to explain the possibility of synthetic and a priori judgments, then it is possible to see why, for many people today, this provides an insurmountable barrier to their introduction to the Critique, since in their opinion there are no synthetic and a priori judgments. However, some of the difficulties can be alleviated if, instead of asking how are synthetic a priori propositions possible, one would ask what are the necessary conditions of a possible experience. In an attempt to answer this question, we must now turn to two of the most important concepts in Kant's critical philosophy.

SPACE AND TIME Kant's major positive achievement in metaphysics can be seen as being his attempt to articulate the general structure of any experience which we could make truly intelligible to ourselves. Thus, the Critique of Pure Reason is meant to be account of what reason can and cannot attempt in the way of a priori metaphysical speculation. To do this, Kant must first develop his own positive account of knowledge. He must establish, for example, that we can only make knowledge-claims about spatio-temporal objects which obey causal laws, and to do this, he must discuss specific problems about space and causality. Thus, one of the most important doctrines of the Transcendental Aesthetic is that our notion of space and time is not derived from experience but is logically prior to it. Objects of experience are necessarily spatial and temporal. We would not perceive objects at all unless they had spatial and temporal positions. "Space and Time, taken together, are the pure forms of all sensible intuition124 which give an essential basic structure to our experience. 123

Norman Kemp Smith, Contemporary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1930), pp. 38-39. 1M

Critique of Pure Reason, A 39/B 56, p. 80.

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For by putting it this way, Kant avoids making the explicit claim that objects in themselves are ideal, for, if he were to make this claim, his theory would be in serious difficulty. For were objects in themselves our ideas only, how could empirical objects be their appearance and be real. However, space is a necessary a priori representation which "concerns only the pure form of intuition"125; in other words, our perception of the object, around us must be spatial and temporal. Kant said: What we have meant to say is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being, nor their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us, and that if the subject, or even only the subjective constitutions of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish.126 Kant is stating explicitly here that the subject relates to the objective world through space and time. But the significant point is that space and time are properties of man and not of the objective world. Man is limited to his space/time horizon. So Kant claims that it is "solely from the human stand-point that we can speak of space, of extended things etc."127 We do not know what objects may be in themselves, apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility. We know them only as they conform to our own mode of perceiving, a mode which is shared by all human beings. It is there that Kant affirms the transcendental ideality of space as well as the compatibility of this ideality with its empirical reality. Hence the Transcendental ideality of space and time is affirmed by Kant on the grounds that they function as a priori conditions of human sensibility, that is as subjective conditions in terms of which alone the human mind is capable of receiving the data for thought or experience. He terms these conditions forms of sensibility. Thus, in space and time

'Ibid.,A31/B46,p.74. 'Ibid., A 42/B 59, p. 82. 'Ibid., A 26/B 42, p. 71.

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empirical objects are ideal in the same sense because they cannot be experienced or described independently of these sensible conditions. In the transcendental sense, then, being external to the mind means being independent of sensibility and its conditions. A transcendentally real object is thus, by definition, a non-sensible object or noumenon. This would be a noumenon "in the negative sense" by which Kant means simply the concept of a thing in so far as it is not an object of our sensible intuition.128 Space and time are the same for all of us while feelings and taste vary from person to person. That "there can be no more than one space and there can be no more than one time" 129 are integral parts of Kant's position. They are necessary conditions for describing space and time as forms of the sensible world. By this is meant that space and time will

128 Ibid., B 307, p. 268. For Kant, any attempt to argue towards the material conditions of experience in isolation from the formal conditions of intuition is doomed to failure from the very start. If we abstract from intuition we have literally nothing left over. The possibility of a noumenon of some type of independent object is canceled out by abstraction from sensible conditions. Kant makes it quite clear at the end of the analytic that the noumenon conceived of as the object of a non sensible intuition is something of which we have neither intuition nor concepts, but is a problem unavoidably bound up with the limitation of our sensibility. A 287/B 344, p. 293. 129 Recently it has been argued that there are conceivable situations in which we would be led to think of our experiences as belonging to two different entirely disconnected spaces or times. From this, it follows, that there is no necessity in the claim that all our experiences must be conceived as belonging together in one space or time. Anthony Quinton in a paper entitled ("Space and Time" Philosophy 37 1962, p. 130-74) first put forward this argument. Quinton tried to give an example of a set of possible experiences which could not plausibly be taken to occur within a unified space. However, he argued that a similar case could not be made for discrete times. Attempts were later made by R. G. Swineburne (Times Analysis Vol 25, 1964, pp. 185-91, and ("Conditions for Bitemporality" Analysis 26, 1965, pp. 47-50) and Martin Hollis ("Times and Spaces" Mind (1967), pp. 524-36) to prove the case for time as well, Hollis arguing that the very postulation of discrete spaces entailed that of discrete times. However, L. Falkenstein argues most convincingly that Kant's idea of space and time can withstand the criticisms of Quinton and Swinburne. F. Felkenstein, "Space and Time : A Kantian Response," Idealistic Studies Vol. xvi, No. 1, Jan 1986, pp. 1-11.

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provide a necessary system of relations in which it is possible that every particular should be located and, through this location, obtain a relation to every other particular.130 Any particular spatial location is a part of space and all parts of space are spatially related to one another. Any particular time is part of time, and all parts of time are temporally related one to another. Kant held that we have no choice but so to think, for, he argued, it can be established a priori that space and time are unities. It would appear that the ideas of space and time have a peculiar status for Kant. He argues that space and time are intuitions and not concepts. They are also a priori and hence pure rather than empirical. They belong to the pure forms of intuitions rather than its matter, and it is this that explains how they can be known a priori. The detailed content of intuition is something given which can only come to light in experience. Once Kant draws his distinction between concepts and intuitions, it was easy for him to see what his predecessors appear to have missed, that knowledge of objects can only consist in the establishment of some connection between concepts and intuitions. It could never consist merely in the possession of some clear and distinct conception, nor could it consist merely in the obtaining of empirical intuitions. And this insight, it has been argued, allowed Kant to anticipate some important anti-Cartesian propositions. It allowed him to see, for example, that there is nothing epistemologically privileged about the mental. For if something which we experience is something to be known only insofar as we think it, or apply some concept to it, then, mental state is itself

130

P. F. Strawson in his book Individuals (London : Methuen, 1959) identifies the space time structure as the framework for actual thought about particulars. He makes the following claims for the spatio-temporal system in our actual thought about particulars: (1) The System is unique and unified. There are only one space and one time and every element in space and time is being related to every other both spatially and temporally, p. 31. (2) It is not a contingent matter, relatively to our actual conceptual system, that empirical reality forms such a structure, rather, it is a condition of the reality of any supposed empirical thing or event that can be located in the structure (p.29). (3) The structure is of use to us in the identification of particulars which enables us to relate all particulars which belong to it, ourselves; for we ourselves not only have a place in the scheme, but know this place (p. 30).

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never known simply by virtue of being a mental state which we have experienced.131 As Kant explains his concept of intuition, it would seem that a representation must satisfy two conditions in order to be an intuition: it must be singular and it must relate immediately to its object. Charles Parson has referred to these as singularity conditions and the immediacy conditions and he doubts that within Kant's philosophy they are one and the same thing.132 Jaakko Hintikka, on the contrary, maintains that, for Kant, the immediacy condition is only the singularity condition stated in another way, so that "Kant's notion of intuition is not very far from what could be called a singular term."133 Both Parsons and Hintikka focus their attention primarily on Kant's philosophy of mathematics and Parsons holds that Hintikka's theory really stands or falls on the interpretation of the role of intuition in mathematics.134

,3i Richard Rorty, "Strawson's Objectivity Argument," The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. XXIV, No. 2, Dec. 1970, p. 239. 132

Charles Parsons, "Kant's Philosophy of Arithmetic," Philosophy, Science and Methods, eds. S. Morgenbesser, P. Suppes, M. White (New York: St. Martins Press, 1969), pp. 568-94. 133

Jaakko Hintikka, "On Kant's Notion of Intuition (Anschauung)," The First Critique: Reflection on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, ed. T. Penelhum, T. Macintosh (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1969), pp. 38-53. 134

C. Parsons, "Kant's Philosophy of Arithmetic," Philosophy Science and Methods, p. 571. Bertrand Russell in his 1901 essay, "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians," says, "The proof that all pure mathematics, including geometry is nothing but formal logic, is a fatal blow to the Kantian philosophy. Kant rightly perceiving that Euclid's propositions could not be deduced from Euclid's axioms without the help of the figures, invented a theory of knowledge to account for this fact and it accounted so successfully that when the fact is shown to be a mere defect in Euclid, and not in the result of the nature of geometrical reasoning Kant's theory also has to be abandoned. The whole doctrine of a priori intuitions, by which Kant explained the possibility of pure mathematics, is wholly inapplicable to mathematics, in the present form." B. Russell, "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians" in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, 3rd ed. (London, 1970), p. 74. Russell believes that Kant's theory of experience is a theory devised to justify Euclid's geometry and that it fails to accomplish this. Russell thinks that the concept of Kant's a priori intuitions is only possible on the assumption that Euclid's geometry is valid, so that the

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For Kant, Space and Time are forms of our sensibility and, as such, are known to us in intuition independently of all objects of experience. The objects, however, must conform to them, for otherwise we cannot know them. Since space, for example, is three dimensional, all objects conforming to the condition of space must also be three dimensional. This we know a priori, that is, prior to any encounter with objects. The same is true with respect to the specific configuration of space - - such as triangles, squares, circles, etc. The theorems pertaining to them must be valid also for all empirical objects we know, or even come to know under the form of space. But the form of intuition may be ready in the mind and thus be such that we can know it independently of experience. Kant claims that we have knowledge of the essential properties of space and time, and argues on this basis that they belong to the form of intuition, and therefore to the subjective constitution of our mind. For: Space does not represent any property of things in themselves, nor does it represent them in their relation to one another. Space is nothing but the form of all appearances of outer sense. It is the subjective condition of all sensibility, under which alone outer intuition is possible for us.135 An immediate difficulty about this whole question is whether Kant is discussing space and time, or the idea of space and time. For Kant, the idea that all objects exist in space is not a proposition whose truth is ascertained by observation. It is not a case that one has arrived at the proposition by generalization from observed cases, i.e., ascertained that all objects observed so far are in space and then inferred that apparently all objects are. But as is already emphasized, it is something which one knows independently of experience. To use Kant's terminology, it is not a proposition a posteriori but a proposition a priori. It is not an object of experience, as are the objects which exist in space; on the contrary, untenabiiity of the latter indirectly proves the impossibility of justifying the former. In another essay, Russell contends that, although we cannot refute the Kantian theory of an a priori intuition, we can remove its grounds one by one through an analysis of the problem. B. Russell, "On Scientific Method in Philosophy," in Metaphysics and Logic and Other Essays, p. 90. Ibid., A 26/B 42, p. 71.

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space and time are necessary conditions of all experience. The objective reality of a concept for the purpose of knowledge does not mean that the object designated by the concept must actually be given, that is, must be real, but rather, that the objects designated by it must be possible in accordance with conditions of all experience. What is true of space is also true of time. That changes and events take place are not things one learns through observation. We do not merely observe that a process occurs in time, but time must be presupposed for the observation of a process. Time therefore, just as space, is an a priori form of intuition. It is a manifestation of subject-unity which enables the organizing subject of experience to differentiate between himself and the world around him. Kant draws an important conclusion based upon the thesis that we are capable of intuitions a priori with respect to space and time. The conclusion which is part of his transcendental idealism is that space and time are nothing but forms of appearances. He argues that space "does not represent any property of things in themselves, but is merely a "subjective condition of sensibility." A casual reading of Kant's arguments would suggest that space and time necessarily pertain to appearance or to the way things appear to us. But they do not pertain to things considered in abstraction from the way they appear to us. Nothing which is intuited in space is a thing in itself and space is not a form which belongs as a property to things, but objects are quite unknown to us in themselves and what we call outward objects are nothing else but mere representations of sensibility, whose form is space, but whose real correlated thing in themselves are not known by means of these representations. The things which we intuit are not in themselves the same as our representation of them in intuition, nor are their relations in themselves so constituted as they appear to us. However, to read Kant this way (that is to view the same things as both appearances and non-appearances - - things which are "appearances" are here viewed as not appearances) would be a misconception. The critical distinction between appearance and things considered in themselves is necessary if reason is to avoid self-contradiction.136 For Kant, even an instance of self-contradiction is intolerable because it robs reason of its fundamental principle, self consistency; that is why the concept of a thing in itself is not the concept of a designated 'Critique of Pure Reason, A 462, A 465/ B 490-493; A 424/B 452.

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class of things, but a concept of reflection. It is just the concept of things, as we would represent them, if we could know them perfectly, that is, if our concept of them were sufficient to answer all the questions reason can pose. Kant's claim, therefore, is not that there is a certain class of things of which we can have no knowledge; but rather, that whatever there may be, we cannot have complete knowledge of them. When Kant claims that he is an empirical realist and denies that he is an empirical idealist, he is really affirming that our experience is not limited to the private domain of our own representations, but includes an encounter with empirically spatio-temporal objects. The claim that space is merely a subjective condition of sensibility is a result of two fundamental Kantian premises. (1) We can think things through reason alone, but we can know them only if, and only insofar as, they can appear in sensible intuition. We can know things, therefore, only as spatial (and temporal) objects.137 (2) But space "does not represent any property of things in themselves." The difference between phenomena and things in themselves is but a difference in the perspective of viewing objects of sensible intuition.

Jill Vance Buroker, Space and Incongruence, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1981, has produced a comprehensive and illuminating study of the development of Kant's understanding of space. The argument begins with Kant's repudiation of Leibnizian epistemology. In particular at issue is Leibniz' "relational theory" of space, and with it, the Leibnizian view that the building blocks of all knowledge are concepts of general ideas not sense impressions. In 1747, Kant himself stood firmly committed to the "relation theory of Space." Even in his essay New System ofMotion and Rest, 1758 he still argued that "the conceptions of motion and rest signify relations among objects rather than the relations of an object to space." Ten years later, however, he explicitly broke with Leibnizian view in "Concerning the Ultimate Foundation for the Differentiations of Regions in Space". What brought about this change was the problem of "incongruence counterparts." Kant dealt with the problem again in the Dissertation of 1770 in the Prolegomena of 1783, and in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science of 1786. Kant finally concluded that space has nothing to do with things as they exist independently of perception, but is transcendentally ideal and Newton's conception of absolute space is, on empirical grounds, an absurdity. See also "Kant's Evaluation of His Relationship to Leibniz" by Charles M. Sherover in The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, ed. Richard Kennington, (Washington, D. C. : The Catholic University of America Press, 1985), pp. 201-227.

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Kant is very clear on this point. This is why, although Kant claims that he is a transcendental idealist, he also regards himself as an empirical realist139 for whom the things themselves are available for scientific investigation.140 Mere intuition of space and time does not constitute a knowledge of space and time. The principle that space and time are "empirically real" in our experiences, but "transcendentally ideal" as forming the structural horizon of any possible experience, encapsules the fundamental principle upon which all else builds. Kant seems to give epistemological preference to time over space, because time is the more comprehensive form of intuition between the two. Everything conceived in space must be conceived through the medium of time, but not everything conceived as present in time must be conceived through the medium of space. Since time is the form of inner sense, every perception passes through time, and what is more significant, every perceived content is placed in time. Time is a medium for what is given in space. Time is not the prima facie form of what is given in space, but the medium through which what is given in space reaches consciousness.

™ Critique ofPure Reason B xxvii, A 370; A 38/B 55. 139

Ibid.,A491/B519.

140

One of the first reviews (Grave-Feder, 1782) of the Critique of Pure Reason described Kant's system as a form of idealism of a piece with that of Berkeley. Kant (Letter to Grave August 7, 1783 in Kant, Philosophical Correspondence 1759-1799 ed. and trans. Arnolf Zweig, [University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp. 98ff]) was not pleased with this comparison. In the Prolegomena he explained that his system, far from agreeing with Berkeley, was the proper antidote to Berkeley's objectionable form of idealism. In an explicit response to the offending review, Prolegomena (Appendix), Kant claimed that when Berkeley made space a mere empirical representation, he reduced all experience to sheer illusion. Kant continued to stress Berkeley's failure to do justice to the special role of space, a source of a priori constraints on experience, when he distinguished his view from Berkeley's in the second edition of the Critique (B 69-72, B 274, Note on B xl of Preface). Indeed, there is a sense in which it can be said that Kant wrote his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics partly in answer to the Grave-Feder review (see the Appendix to that work).

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Kant argues later on that there must be a middle term on the basis of which the manifold received through human sensibility can be actively combined in accordance with the categories. This middle term must have the following properties: "This mediating representation must be pure, that is, void of all empirical content, and yet at the same time, while it must in one respect be intellectual, it must in another be sensible. Such a representation is the transcendental schema."141 The mediating term must be related to both sensibility and the understanding. It must be connected to both, in order to be the basis of their union. The middle term, that Kant refers to, is time, the universal condition of human sensibility. Time can perform this function because: Now a transcendental determination of time is so far homogeneous with the category, which constitutes its unity, in that it is universal and rests upon an a priori rule. But, on the other hand, it is so far homogeneous with appearance, in that time is contained in every empirical representation of the manifold. Thus an application of the category to appearance becomes possible by means of the transcendental determination of time... .142 Unlike other concepts, categories are specially in need of schemata, because their application involves no intuitable third thing such as an image. A transcendental schema is a transcendental time-determination which is an a priori rule and thus, similar to a category. Yet, it is also similar to appearance. Thus, in response to the problem, as to how the pure categories, which are supposed to have been produced by the forms of judgment, can apply to sensory appearance, Kant states that time somehow mediates between the intellectual and the sensible and produces the schematized categories of substance, causation, etc. These are the Critique of Pure Reason, A 138 / B 177, p. 181. Ibid.,A139/B179,p. 189.

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categories which we actually use and these, because they essentially involve time, will apply to the objects of sensory experience.

Chapter Four KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM: APPEARANCES AND THINGS IN THEMSELVES Transcendental idealism is an attempt to state the limits of human knowledge. Kant said: By transcendental idealism I mean the doctrine that appearances are to be regarded as being, one and all, representations only, not things in themselves, and that time and space are therefore only sensible forms of our intuition, not determinations given as existing by themselves, nor conditions of objects, viewed as things in themselves. 143

We can know things only in so far as we can intuit them. But intuition is subject to conditions. We can intuit things only in terms of their spatial and temporal determination. Hence we can know things

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 369, p. 345. In The Dialogues and the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley presents similar arguments for idealism and contends that he is content to let his entire case for idealism rest on the impossibility of unperceived objects. See George Berkeley, Principle, Section 22 and The Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous I. Kant's ultimate argument for refuting idealism rests on the premise that self-knowledge implies knowledge of the world because the world provides the only possible justification for self-knowledge claims or the only criterion for their validity. Thus the more persuasive argument in the "Refutation" is directed against the problematic form of idealism that is supposedly held by Descartes or other representationalists. This type of idealism holds that the existence of objects in space outside us is doubtful and indemonstrable. In refuting this argument Kant begins with what he takes to be the fundamental position of the idealists and attempts to show that this position of the idealists makes necessary his own position. The premise he chooses is that we have inner experience. The task he sets himself is that by showing that "inner experience which for Descartes is indubitable, is possible only on the assumption of outer experience." (B 275).

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only as bodies which occupy space and last through time. In recent times, Karl Popper epitomizing Kant's sentiments said: The thing in itself is, unknowable: we can only know its appearances which are to be understood (as pointed out by Kant) as resulting from the thing in itself and from our own perceiving apparatus. Thus appearances result from a kind of interaction between the things in themselves and ourselves. Thus the one thing may appear to us in different forms, according to our different ways of perceiving it, of observing it, and of interacting with it. We try to catch as it were, the thing in itself, but we never succeed: we can only find appearances in 144

our traps. Kant's whole thesis is centered on two modes of reflection: upon things as phenomena and upon the very same things in themselves. As he puts it in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: "Our Critique [teaches] that the object is to be taken in a two-fold sense, namely as appearance and as thing in itself."145 And in the body of the text he says: "Appearance, which always has two sides, the one by which the object is contemplated in and by itself (without regard to the mode of intuiting i t ) . . . the other by which the form of the intuition of this object is taken into account." 146 In the Antimony of Pure Reason Kant defines transcendental idealism as the doctrine that:

Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1959), p. 453. See K. Lorenz, Die Rueckseite des Spiegels: Versuch einer Naturgeschichte menschlichen Erkennens [Munich-Zurich, 1973 (English translation: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, London, 1977) for a discussion of what is characterized as hypothetical realism - - an offshoot of Kant's empirical realism. Hypothetical realism stresses the hypothetical nature of all knowledge, and whereas critical realism takes the existence of the world as evident, unquestionable, and intuitively warranted, hypothetical realism distinguishes psychological certainty and epistemological uncertainty and takes even the existence of the world as a conjecture and tries to find arguments supporting that hypothesis. ^Critique of Pure Reason, B xxvii, p. 28. 'Ibid., A 38/B 55 p. 80.

62

Kant 's Transcendental Idealism Objects of any experience possible to us are nothing but appearances that is, mere representations, which, in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings, or as series of alterations, have no independent existence outside our thoughts.147

The above passages would seem to indicate that the defining characteristic of transcendental idealism is its confusion of mere appearance with things in themselves. For instance an analysis of the knowledge we claim reveals that mind puts something of itself into what it knows both at the level of seeing and thought. In the Kantian sense, we possess both a priori intuitions and a priori concepts and on the basis of these we can, to a certain extent, anticipate experience. Thus trans-cendental idealism can be said to be designed to avoid two extremes: on the one hand, complete idealism, whereby everything, except perhaps our minds themselves, is claimed to be somehow ideal; and, on the other hand, the realism of common sense which holds that many familiar things around us exist quite independently of our minds or cognitive capacities. Transcendental idealism seems to take a middle path by distinguishing between the world of appearances and the world of things in themselves. The world of appearances is not wholly ideal nor wholly a creation of our minds and, though different from the world of things in themselves, is yet not separable from it. However, this interpretation is untenable even if Kant contributed to its wide appeal within certain philosophical circles, by being ambiguous at times in his formulations of things in themselves and appearances. For instance, what does Kant mean by "in itself? It seems quite clear what he means by viewing things as "appearances" - - namely, viewing them as objects of our sensory intuition as interpreted by the concepts of the understanding. But when things are considered "in themselves" they are being considered "without regard to the constitution of our sensibility."148 That is, to contemplate things "in themselves" means not to regard them as appearances.149 However, it would seem that to view the same thing as both appearance and non-appearance involves a contradiction. Ibid.,A491/B519,p.439.

'lbid.,A256/B312 p. 273.

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If this reading of Kant is correct, then he would certainly be guilty of Hegel's repeated charge of "subjectivism" and his claim that, for Kant, knowledge fails to include the things of the world. For Hegel, the real is not "behind" or "beyond" but actually present in what we apprehend. What we know are the things themselves, their properties, unities and relations. However, this apparent contradiction can be resolved if we consider Kant's formulations of things as appearance and also in themselves from the point of view of transcendental reflection. Kant himself puts it this way: "Appearances, insofar as they are thought as objects according to the unity of the categories are called phenomena."150 Here Kant seems to mean by "appearance" the empirical appearances in sense perception. By "phenomena" he seems to mean the transcendental-philosophical characterization of the very things which empirical cognition has as its object (physical or mental objects). In other words: although empirical cognition can, and does, regard its objects, as things in themselves, these very same objects, along with all appearances, are but phenomena for transcendental reflection.151 Thus, there are two levels of viewing the same objects. From the empirical point of view, the objects constitute an empirical reality with which our sciences are concerned. These objects exist independently of any particular subject viewing them. All empirical things considered in themselves remain legitimate objects of the empirical sciences. As Kant himself indicates: "The natural appearances are objects which are given to us independently of our concepts, and the key to them lies not in us

Ibid., A 249 ff; p. 265 ff. A phenomenon is not only an object of experience, it is also a possible object of experience. It is the latter as well as the former because the form of all phenomena is a priori, and since the same a priori structure of the mind forms all experience into objects of'experience' one feature of experience can be known even before any particular experiences are formed by the same a priori structure of the mind. This is what Kant means by saying that an interpretation of phenomena as object is object under the unity of the categories. 151

Gerald Prauss, in his Kant und das Problem der Dinge an Sich, was the first interpreter of Kant to develop this insight of distinguishing between a thing in itself and an appearance in terms of the more basic distinctions between a transcendental and an empirical sense of viewing the same thing.

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and our pure thinking, but outside us."152 From the transcendental point of view, however, these very same things are "phenomena" which, as conceptually determined appearances, depend, on the one hand, on our sensibility, and, on the other hand, on the interpretative function of the understanding. Empirical objects are of two types, the external or physical, and the internal or mental. For example, there are sciences like chemistry and biology which deal with a world of things that is empirically objective. But there are also sciences like psychology which deal with subject matter that is empirically subjective but would still conform to Kant's understanding of appearances. Whatever is empirically real (the empirically subjective along with the empirically objective) must be seen "as appearances." However, there is one significant difference between the two: the empirically objective always is an actualization of what the subject projects as other than itself; the empirically subjective, on the other hand, is the actualization of the subject itself as an empirical subject. It is self-actualization, and the experience is essentially an introspection for which, only something like an empirically mental phenomenon can be an object. The experiencing self, however, as experiencing can never become an object. It is and remains the empirical manifestation of the nonempirical subject. This means that the non-empirical subject which one recognizes in the empirical subject when one views the empirical subject "in itself is precisely the same subject which one sees when one views it "as appearance". In other words, whether one views it "as appearance" or as in itself, one always encounters the non-empirical subject within the empirical. By distinguishing between a transcendental and an empirical use of a thing in itself we are allowed to speak of empirical things in themselves. This move enables us to talk about objects of experience that can appear to us in different ways, but cannot be presented to us without any form of intuitions at all. Regarded empirically, objects of experience are independent in that they are logically distinguished from the forms of intuitions under which we perceive them. The distinction is not between a thing considered as an appearance and the same thing considered as a thing in itself. It is rather between a 'Critique of Pure Reason, A 48/B 508, p. 433.

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consideration of a thing as it appears and a consideration of the same thing as it is in itself. The concept of the appearance of a thing and the ground for this concept cannot be the same in principle, for they belong to different levels of cognition. The concept of the appearance of things is a matter of empirical fact; the ground for this concept is disclosed in transcendental reflection as a non-empirical insight into the structure of our cognition of empirical things. 153 Nothing in this view implies that considering something as an appearance entails considering it as a thing that both exists "in itself and also appears to us in certain ways. Regarding something as an appearance is simply regarding it with respect to the necessary conditions required for obtaining knowledge of a thing ofthat sort. The notion of a thing "in itself accordingly is simply that of the possibility of regarding things in abstraction from those conditions. 154 For some philosophers, the cognitive realms by which we present reality to ourselves must be defined in terms of particular mental objects. These, for example, would be the ideas of Berkeley and Hume. According to Hume reason is responsible for identifying relations between ideas, but the ideas have been acquired through the senses. In contrast, a traditional rationalist insists that the paradigm of knowledge is knowledge through the understanding. In so far as the sense yields knowledge at all, it is only a very dim, muddy confused approximation to the real thing, knowledge through reason or understanding, such as knowledge of logical and mathematical truths. When Descartes talks through the aid of his translators of clearly and distinctly perceiving this or that, he is not referring to perfect vision or hearing but to the knowledge characteristic of the understanding as reason. These philosophers believe that cognitive dealings with reality are effected via cognitive involvement with reality (ideas) internal to the process of cognition itself. For other philosophers the possibility of cognitive contact with extra-mental reality is not something calling for explanation at all, and it stands in no need of mediation by means of something more primordial. In either case Kant's predecessors tended to take one thing as fundamental; the presentation of objects to the faculty by which they are then to be recognized. The Kantian insight is that cognitive relations must in every case rest upon the foundation of cognitive states (the functions of the mind). It must rest upon states of the knower whose internal constitution is such that it is in the first place possible for those states to present it with objects of possible cognition. 154 When we consider things in themselves and their appearances there is no duplication of entities involved at all. We do not have a special class of transcendent entities impinging on the phenomenal world, but what we have is a special way of obtaining information about perfectly ordinary objects.

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The distinction, then, is between things considered with respect to, and in abstraction from, a certain set of considerations. In other words, the distinction is between things as objects of experience and those same objects as things in themselves, or as Kant says "viewing objects from two different points of view."155 As indicated already, there are statements in the Critique of Pure Reason which seem to contradict this interpretation. For example, Kant says "while much can be said a priori as regards the form of appearances, nothing whatsoever can be asserted of the thing in itself, which may underlie these appearances."156 And: If our subjective constitution be removed, the represented object, with the qualities which sensible intuition bestows upon it is nowhere to be found, and cannot possibly be found. For it is this subjective constitution which determines its form as appearances.157 When we reflect on passages like these in the Critique, we find that the thing in itself as an unknowable entity is the projection of a reason that strives to transcend all limits of possible experience.158 Although we cannot think of an object any other way but through the categories "we cannot know an object so thought save through intuitions corresponding to these concepts."159 For us to see what is being intimated at, we need to be reminded that Kant draws a sharp distinction between transcendental realists who "interpret outer appearances (their reality being taken as granted) as thing-in-themselves, which exist independent of us and of our sensibility"160 and his position, which he identifies as transcendental

B xix, p. 23. 'Ibid.,A49/B66,p.87. 'Ibid., A 44/B 62, p. 84. !

A131/B171ff,p. 177.

'Ibid., B 165, p. 173. 'Ibid., A 369, p. 346.

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idealism161 according to which "external things exist as well as I myself but are, nevertheless "mere appearances and are therefore nothing but a species of my representations."162 "The understanding can never transcend those limits of sensibility within which alone objects can be given to us."163 To speak of "things-in-themselves" which, presumably, transcends these limits "is impossible."164 "What the things-inthemselves may be I do not know, nor do I need to know, since a thing can never come before me except in appearance."165 In the amphiboly, Liebniz is attacked for teaching that appearances are confused representations of things in themselves and Locke for maintaining that there is a direct causal link between our ideas and unknown objects which cause them. Kant's position must be different. What Kant is saying is that appearances in the transcendental sense do not represent things in themselves for the very reason that there is no "other" to be represented. They do not point beyond themselves to something otherwise unknown in Lockean manner. The distinction is never that between nominal and real essence. There is only one object which may be viewed both as the object of scientific investigation and

""Transcendental idealism is defined here as the doctrine that appearances are to be regarded as being one and all representations only, not things in themselves and that time and space are therefore only sensible forms of our intuition, not conditions of objects viewed as things in themselves. The basis of this distinction lies in the Kantian contention that the distinction between appearances and things in themselves is transcendental and not empirical. It is not the result of a direct reflection upon the objects of our experience, but a second order analysis of the necessary condition of their cognition. Thus, a transcendental idealism is compatible with an empirical realism, namely the belief that objects as they are presented to consciousness in experience really are in space and time. In the aesthetic this is argued in terms of the thesis that space and time as a priori forms of sensibility are empirically real and transcendentally ideal. X62

Critique of Pure Reason, A 370, p. 346.

163

Ibid., B 303, p. 264.

,,

164

Ibid.,A276/B332,p.286.

'Ibid., A 277/B 333 p. 286.

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as phenomena for philosophical reflection, not a pseudo-object which points beyond itself to the real object. Kant also said: through observation and analysis of appearances we penetrate to nature's inner recesses, and no one can say how far this knowledge may in time extend. But with all this knowledge, and even if the whole of nature were revealed to us, we should still never be able to answer those transcendental questions which go beyond nature.166 Although our science deals directly with empirical things, Kant's transcendental philosophical analysis of cognition makes it clear that "no objects can be represented through pure concepts of understanding apart from the conditions of sensibility."167 But by applying its pure concepts i.e., its categories, a priori to objects of intuition in general, the understanding forms that inner "non-empirical object" or "object in general," 168 the "transcendental object = x." 169 However, this conception of a transcendental object can serve only as a conception of unity. For, "by means of this the understanding combines the manifold into the concept of an object."170 In other words, the transcendental object is not itself an existing object and certainly not a thing in itself. It is "only the representation of appearance under the concept of an object in general - - a concept which is determinable through the manifold of these appearances." 171

166

Ibid.,A278/B334,p.287.

167

Ibid., A 567/B 595, p 485, cf A 288-89/ B 344-45, pp. 293-4.

168

Ibid., A 108, p. 137.

169

Ibid.,A109,p. 137.

170

Ibid., A 250, p. 268.

171

Ibid., A 251, p. 268. In the Critique ofPure Reason, Kant made it clear, that reference to an object is solely the work of the understanding, and the reference to an object consists in the unity of the concept. When we try to separate out the real content of the object to which we refer our representations, we find that we have only a correlate of the transcendental unity of apperception, something which cannot be separated from the sensible

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69

However, it has been argued by many modern critics of transcendental philosophy that all it proves is that a certain conceptual framework is necessitated by the way the world is structured for us. It is further argued that since this is only a conceptual necessity, to demonstrate its reality something more is required, namely, some sort of verification procedure. 172 According to this theory, Kant's transcendental idealism is a metaphysical theory that affirms the unknowability of the real (things in themselves) and relegates knowledge to the pure subjective realm of representations and appearance. It thus combines a phenomenalistic account of what is

representation of appearances under the concept of an object in general. The thought of the transcendental object is essentially the undetermined, which if a manifold of intuition is given can be determined by the categories working on this given manifold. By themselves the categories determined no particular object, but rather make possible the determination of various empirical objects, all of which are merely, in that sense determination of the one transcendental object. 172 See Barry Stroud: "Transcendental Arguments," Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 241-256 and P. Hacker: "Are Transcendental Arguments a Version of Verificationism?" American Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1972): 78-85. Stroud remains dubious of the success of Kant's transcendental arguments. He confronts those who propose such argument with a dilemma. Either these arguments are little more than an elaborate and superfluous screen behind which we can discern a simple reliance on a simple form of verification principle, or the most that such arguments can establish is that, in order for the intelligible formulations of skeptical doubt to be possible, or generally in order for self-conscious thoughts and experience to be possible, one must take it, or believe, that one has knowledge of say, external physical objects or other minds. For related criticism the following works can be considered a good sample: M.S. Gram, "Must Transcendental Arguments be Spurious?" Kant Studien (1974): 304-317; S. Koerner, "The Impossibility of Transcendental Deduction," Kant Studies Today, ed. L.W. Beck La Salle (1969), pp. 230-44; Richard Rorty, "Verificationism and Transcendental Arguments," Nous (1971): 3-14; E. Schaper, "Arguing Transcendentally," Kant Studien (1972): 101-16; M.G. Kalin, "Kant's Transcendental Arguments as Gedanken Experimente" Kant Studien (1972): 315-328; J. Hintikka, "Transcendental Arguments. Genuine and Spurious," Nous (1972): 274-81; H.L. Ruf, "Transcendental Logic: An Essay on Critical Metaphysics, " Man and World (1969): 38-64. F. Dreske, "Epistemic Operators," Journal of Philosophy Vol 67 (1970). Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass., 1981, p. 689).

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actually experienced by the mind and therefore knowable with the postulation of an additional set of entities which in terms of the very theory, are unknowable. Indeed, this kind of interpretation can be traced back to Kant's contemporaries. 173 This type of criticism is widely accepted in the Anglo-American philosophical circles. This view received its most novel interpretation in P.F. Strawson 174 who defined transcendental idealism as the doctrine that reality is supersensible and that we can have no knowledge of it.175 Starting with this understanding of Kant's idealism Strawson thus proceeds to separate what he terms the analytic argument of the Critique from the transcendental idealism which he believes Kant unfortunately and unnecessarily entangled it.176 Thus, for Strawson there are two strands in Kant's thought in the Critique of Pure Reason}11 On the one hand, there is an analytic strand

For an account of many of these early interpretations see Hans Vaihinger, Kommentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd ed. (StuttgafiV Berlin/Leipzig: W. Spemann, 1881-92), pp. 494-505. Vaihinger believed that a thing in itself is a limiting concept and concluded that it is in the end of an infinite series of appearances. See Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of "As If, trans. C. L. Ogden (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), Chapter XVII and Kuno Fisher, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, 2nd ed. (Heidelberg: F. Bassermann, 1869), Vol. Ill, pp. 219-21; John Hoaglund has provided an account of English speaking criticism in "The Thing itself in English Interpretations of Kant," American Philosophical Quarterly 10 (January 1973): 1-14. 174

P.F. Strawson, The BoundofSense (London: Methuen, 1966).

175

Ibid., p. 38.

.-

176

Ibid.,p. 16.

177 D.P. Dryer holds views quite dissimilar from that of Strawson. He claims that the idea of a thing in itself is a distinction between two ways in which the same thing is regarded - - between considering it in a certain relation, namely as presented to the senses, and considering it apart from that relation. This might be considered as the two descriptions theory. Typical statements of the theory in Kant are Bxxvi-Bxxvii; A 38/B 55; B 69; A 538. If this theory is right, the object that appears to us (that is in the spatio-temporal mode) might appear without them to other modes of intuitions. This is precisely what makes the object appearing to us unknowable as a thing in itself. So, the crucial

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in which Kant is concerned with the set of ideas which forms the limiting framework of all our thoughts about the world and experience of the world. On the other hand, there is the doctrine of transcendental idealism. Strawson maintains that these two strands are not merely distinguishable, they are independent of each other.178 The analytic strand contains much that is worth preserving. The doctrine of transcendental idealism, however, is incoherent and based on misleading analogy.179 There is no case for preserving any part of it. It can be abandoned without any real damage to Kant's analytic achievement. It appears that Strawson sees transcendental idealism as a two-layer doctrine. He often refers to an element of the relatively familiar kind of phenomenalistic idealism in Kant's thought and comments that "Kant as

assumption of this is that one and the same object can satisfy two different descriptions. (D.P. Dryer, Kant's Solution for Verification in Metaphysics (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1966), p. 514. For similar views see Erich Adikes, Kant und das Dinge an Sich (Berlin: Pan Verlag Rolf Heise, 1924), pp. 20ff; H.F. Paton, Kant's Metaphysics of Experience, Vol. I, pp. 59ff; Walter Broecker, "Kants Lehre von der aeusseren Affektion", Forschungen und Fortschritte 20 (1944): 151-154. 178

Michel Meyer, though arriving at a different conclusion from that of Strawson, also discusses two similar trends in Kant's Transcendental Idealism. M. Meyer, "The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories: Its Impact on German Idealism and Neo-Positivism" in Dialectica, Vol. 35, Nos. 1-2, 1981, pp. 7-20. 179 Strawson not only rejects transcendental idealism as incoherent, he also provides an account of what led Kant to this disastrous doctrine. As he sees it, transcendental idealism is the direct result of Kant's perversion of the scientifically minded philosophers' contrast between a realm of physical objects composed of primary qualities and a mental realm consisting of the sensible appearances of these objects. This mental realm, like its Kantian counterpart, he thought, is produced by means of our affection of the mind, in this case by physical objects. Kant allegedly perverts this model by assigning the whole spatio-temporalframeworkto the subjective constitutions of the human mind. The resulting doctrine is judged to be incoherent because, among other reasons, it is with reference only to a spatio-temporal framework that one can talk intelligently about affection. See The Bound of Sense, pp. 38-42.

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transcendental idealist is closer to Berkeley than he acknowledges." 180 On the other hand, Strawson seems to think of phenomenalism as only an element in transcendental idealism. He holds transcendental idealism proper as the doctrine that the real world is a supersensible world of non- spatio-temporal things in themselves which stand to each other in a mysterious quasi-causal relation which he calls the "A. relation." The result of this relation is the representations in the human mind which are the object of our knowledge. If Strawson is right, Kant, in effect, believed that there were two worlds, two domains containing two types of entities.181 One world contains representations or appearances which like Berkeley's "ideas" have a purely mental existence. The ordering of these representations, in accordance with the forms of intuition and the categories, produces the world of empirical reality. But what we normally call real objects are in fact mere appearance, which exist only in us. The real world is

Ibid., p. 22. Turbayne has also argued quite persuasively that to a considerable degree the empirical realism Kant seeks to establish throughout all of the various refutations of idealism is the same as the realism which Berkeley ultimately held. Colin Turbayne, "Kant's Relation to Berkeley" in L. W. Beck, Kant Studies Today, Open Court, 1969, pp. 88-116. 181 There are also others like Moltke Gram who state positively that Kant postulates two separate entities, things in themselves and appearances. According to Gram, Kant requires such entities because of the doctrine of space and time as forms of intuition. If we were affected by ultimately real spatio-temporal features rather than transcendental things in themselves, it could not be held that space and time are mere forms. For Gram, the basis of the distinction between things in themselves and appearance is the existence of what Kant calls the relation of affection (B68-69). The basis ofthat relation in turn is the distinction between two relations, one of which is something we perceive, while the other brings about the content ofthat perception by affecting us. Gram interprets Kant as suggesting that without the affection conditions there can be no distinction between things as we perceive them to be and things as they are. And without the cognitive conditions what we perceive will inevitably be things as they are. Moltke Gram, "The Myth of Double Affection," in Reflections on Kant's Philosophy, ed. W. H. Werkmeister (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1975), pp. 30 ff. See also Moltke Gram, "Transcendental Arguments," Nous 5 No. 1 (1971), pp. 15ff; Moltke Gram, "Things in Themselves: What They Must Be," Ratio, Vol 18, No.l, 1976, pp. 16 ff.

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supersensible; it contains things in themselves which are not in space and time and which are not knowable in the ordinary way, although their existence needs to be postulated for various reasons. It is quite possible for Kant to be interpreted this way. But how close is Kant to Berkeley? Kant himself believed that he was very far apart. In the second edition, Refutation of Idealism, he claims to have undermined in the Transcendental Aesthetic the very ground on which Berkeley's idealism rests. The reference is to the conclusion drawn in the Aesthetic that space and the things in space were empirically real, whereas Berkeley regarded the things in space as merely imaginary entities because he thought of space itself as a "non-entity."182 Thus Kant accepted the fact that objects in space were real and denied they were a mere illusion.183 That Kant's empirical world is not subjective in the personal sense is shown, above all, in his insistence on its objective character. It has been suggested that Kant's Transcendental Idealism is the doctrine that mind makes nature, that the world as we know it is somehow the product of our thought processes. However, this understanding is not entirely correct. Kant did not believe that natural objects and states of affairs exist only insofar as they are perceived or thought about by individual percipients. Indeed, against this stands the doctrine of Empirical Realism which maintains that space and time and their contents as scientifically described are things whose reality must be acknowledged by every human observer and whose existence is accordingly independent of any particular mind. There is a sense in which the Kantian Transcendental Idealist is also an Empirical Realist, and this would imply that such a person cannot believe, as some other idealists do, that the existence of objects depends on their being perceived. Henry Allison184 dissents strongly from those interpreters who believe that Kant postulated two separate entities - - things in themselves and appearances. Indeed, the main object of his work is to

Immanuel Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, B 274, p. 244. I83

lbid., B 70, p. 89.

184

Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

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argue against this interpretation in detail. To understand Kant's philosophy, he claims, one first needs to acknowledge the sharp distinctions Kant made between what holds from the point of view of ordinary consciousness and what holds at the philosophical or transcendental level. As an ordinary person Kant did not believe that material things are nothing but ideas in the mind; indeed, Kant went out of his way to repudiate that view. But his opposition to empirical realism did not carry with it a commitment to realism when philosophical considerations came into reckoning. To say that transcendental idealism is true is to say that experience is conditioned by a series of "epistemic" factors, some having to do with sensibility, others with the human intellect. Allison rigorously opposes any attempt at suggesting Kant did indeed argue for two separate entities. Therefore he says: The claim that certain philosophers erroneously treat mere appearance as if they were things in themselves no more entails that there are :.-.. things in themselves than the claim that a certain person acts as if he were God entails the existence of a deity. Moreover, in those places in the Critique where Kant is most concerned with the concept of the thing in itself and the related concepts of the Noumenon and the Transcendental object . . ., his primary intent seems to be either to articulate his critique of Leibnizian nominalism or to correct some of the excesses of his own position in the Inaugural Dissertation.185 Allison repeatedly refers to the Kantian notion of experience, but pays less attention to the Kantian claim that it is from experience and its possibility that philosophy must take its stand. Once it is allowed that this is so and argued that experience is not only given but has, as it were, to be achieved, then the question arises as to what characteristics must be present for experience to obtain. It is only because objects of experience must conform to the constitution of our minds that we can have the sort of a priori knowledge of the nature of experience which is demonstrated in the Critique. However, Allison seems to be correct in pointing out that Kant was reacting against transcendental metaphysics of the Leibnizian type, which relies on our making sense of a "God's-eye-view" of reality. For 'Ibid., pp. 237-238.

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Leibniz, the "real" world was timeless and our experience of things as temporal was a result of our confused awareness of reality. The point of the Copemican Revolution is to remind philosophers that they cannot have a view of reality sub specie aeternitatis. Only in the human way can human beings know about things, using the human conceptual framework. One of the reasons for insisting that our experience is of "appearance" and that we cannot know anything of things in themselves is at least in part to remind us that the things we can say, and hence the things we can know, are determined by the nature of our human experience and that we cannot step outside the limitations of our human experience. After much discussion Allison decided on a double-aspect interpretation of the thing in itself. He contends that the distinction between thing in itself and appearance is not between a thing considered as an appearance and the same thing considered as a thing in itself, but rather between a consideration of a thing as it appears and a consideration of the same thing as it is in itself.186 He points to Gerald Prauss187 as the chief originator of this idea but fails to discuss Prauss' overall view. Prauss' main argument is that within the framework of Kant's philosophy the expression "thing in itself can be understood in two distinctly different senses: in a transcendental sense, which Kant himself inherited; and in an untenable transcendental metaphysical sense which always comes into the discussion even in Kant's own formulations. The problem arises from the ambiguity of the phrase "thing in itself." After an examination of Kant's three Critiques, the Prolegomena, and The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Prauss finds that Kant uses the brief form Ding an Sich (Thing itself) only 37 times but the longer form Ding an Sich Selbst (thing in itself) 258 times. Such statistics, Prauss contends, can hardly be considered mere chance. But what is more important is the fact that both the expressions "thing itself and "thing in itself and their equivalents are abbreviated forms of the expression "things viewed or contemplated in 186

lbid., p. 248.

187

Gerold Prauss, Kant und das Problem der Dinge an Sich (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974).

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themselves." A typical example of such usage is found in the beginning of the first Critique: " . . . in respect of things then they are considered in themselves through reason, that is, without regard to the constitution of our sensibility."189 Only after this statement does Kant speak of things in themselves. He never uses the form thing-inthemselves hyphenated, and nowhere does he hypostatize such things. Prauss insists that in distinction from empirical cognition (such as we find in the sciences) transcendental philosophy is a non-empirical cognition of the empirical.190 It differs from metaphysics, which, transcending the empirical, hypostatizes non-empirical entities. Kant's transcendental philosophy is directed neither against empirical cognition nor against non-empirical cognition as such, but against the non differentiation of the two - - of which metaphysics is guilty. To view empirical objects solely as subjective appearances means to overlook what is decisive as the result of transcendental reflection, namely, that empirical objects exist over against the subject as concretisations of the transcendental object in general and the objective interpretation of the particular or sensory intuition. It is possible to view empirical objects as appearances because Prauss approaches the Kantian problem of "appearance" and things in themselves by an analysis of the conception of truth in Kant. Within transcendental logic the question What is truth? comes to mean the same as the question about the nature of cognition. It involves asking What defines cognition as such? Truth, as opposed to falsehood, has no relevance in this context. Prauss can argue, therefore, that since false as well as true empirical judgments are meaningful, the meaning of judgment in general cannot coincide with either its truth or its falsity; nor does it depend on the presence or absence of our empirical object. What this comes to is that the object to which a judgment - - be it true or false - - must relate in order to be meaningful, must in principle be other than an empirical object. Kant calls it the transcendental object = X which in all our cognition is always the one and the same = X and is that which alone can at all confer upon our empirical concepts a

'Ibid., p. 20. 'Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 28/B 44, p. 72. 'Prauss, pp. 178f.

Kant 's Transcendental Idealism

11

relation to an object - - that is objective reality.191 "This transcendental object... is not itself an object of cognition" but only the concept of an object in general which is determined (as an empirical object) through the manifold of appearance. It can, therefore, also give meaning to false judgment, that is, to judgments which find no determination in and through appearances. Under no circumstances however is the concept of an object in general, to be taken for an independent object. The unity which it "makes necessary can be nothing other than the formal unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifold of representations."192 Prauss readily acknowledges that Kant did not always set forth clearly the transcendentally two-level meaning of the concept of appearances193 and that he often confused the second level of transcendental reflection with the first level of empirical cognition. However, the fact that subjective appearances are always involved in our cognition of empirical objects, does not in itself imply that these objects are nothing but appearances. The situation is definitely the other way around. Known to us as the result of our interpretation of subjective appearances, the objects are always something other than appearances, and are precisely the non-subjective objects of science as distinguished from the merely subjective elements of experience.194

191

Critique of Pure Reason, A 109, p. 137.

192

Ibid., A 105, p. 135.

193

The inconsistency in Kant's formulations of appearance and the thing in itself and his equivocation of the use of the concept of the transcendental object seems to have led John Findlay to suggest that the thing in itself performs a cognitive explanatory function and, therefore, that Kant intended it to do so. J. N. Findlay, Kant and the Transcendental Object (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1981). He begins (p.l) by saying that a thing in itself and an appearance are not different objects but rather the same object conceived in respect of certain intrinsically unapparent features. He goes on to say that we must also conceive of what is thus non-apparent as so affecting us that it can appear before us, or be variously given in experience (p.2). Professor Findlay does not explain whether these non-apparent features are possessed by objects in our world or in some other, possible, world. Prauss, p. 185.

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Ultimately this kind of exposition points to the fact that Kant's transcendental philosophy is explicitly presented as the discipline which takes over the task of exploring the categories1 5 since we cannot think without categories. Indeed categories form the main body of transcendental philosophy. For an explanation of how the categories function in transcendental philosophy, we must turn to the transcendental deduction.

195

A Category (in the Kantian sense) is a pure form of objectivity, a highly general universal under which every object or objective state of affairs must fall, if it is to be an object of experience. To describe an object at all, it must be possible to describe it in terms of a concept included in the category or categories in question. Thus the categories are conditions for all knowledge and experience of the material given to us through the senses. Categories are conditions for all empirical knowledge. Their function is to organize, conceive and understand (to categorize) the sense given stuff.

CHAPTER FIVE THE TRANSCENDENTAL ANALYTIC 1. The Deduction of the Categories The deduction of the categories is a transcendental proof. Kant tells us that the conclusion of a transcendental argument should be entitled a principle, not a theorem, because it has the peculiar character that it makes possible the very experience which is its own ground of proof, and that in this experience it must always be presupposed.196 Therefore, a transcendental argument is one which shows the possibility of certain types of synthetic knowledge a priori by showing how it is due to those activities of ours by means of which the knowledge in question is obtained.197 If the categories are a priori valid (valid of empirical objects) as Kant suggests, it must be shown how the understanding is itself by means of concepts, the author of experience,198 so that experience is not something merely assumed in order to reason back to its condition. Rather, the possibility of the objective validity of the categories is demonstrated on its own account. Critique ofPure Reason, B 765. 197

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans, by Lewis White Beck (Bobbs-Merrill Co.: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1976), p. 41. 198

Ibid., p. 127. One of Kant's main endeavors in the Transcendental Analytic is to regard concepts as rules or at least essentially involving rules for the carrying out of certain operations in relation to our faculty of judgment. As such, concepts serve to unify or arrange representations (intuitions) and "bring them to the unity of consciousness." Since all consciousness requires a synthetic unity, all consciousness requires concepts. This is the meaning of the second half of the famous dictum, "Thoughts without content are empty intuitions, without concepts are blind."(A 51/B 75). The primary textual basis for denying that concepts are for Kant, genuine mental entities, or items of some sort, is the fact that Kant attempts to explicate the notion of a "rule" for the synthesis of a manifold of intuition.

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What we find in the Second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason is a proof of the validity of the categories which is at one and the same time an explanation of the possibility of their relation to sensibility, a proof which avoids taking up the problems of an analysis of the cognitive faculties. Kant's challenge was to prove conclusively that the structure of the human mind was as important for our capacity to know as the raw data of experience. He maintained that only these a priori principles, already present in human beings, made the very conception possible. The major task of the transcendental logic,199 therefore, is to explicate the concept of a mind that gains knowledge of the world of which it is a part. The place where Kant presents his most novel argument as to how the mind functions is in the transcendental deduction. While some well-known interpreters of Kant's first Critique200 have taken his transcendental deduction to be an argument from the fact of consciousness to the existence of the objective world, I

Kant introduces the transcendental analytic with a short discussion of the distinctions of transcendental logicfromother kinds of logic (general logic). General logic "abstracts from all relation of knowledge to the object, and considers only the logical form in the relation of any knowledge to other knowledge" A 55/B 79, p. 95. Transcendental logic is to be differentiated from formal logic in the following important respects. Although it is also to be considered general and pure and based on principles a priori it is supposed to be a logic in which we do not abstractfromthe entire content of knowledge (A 55-56/B 81, pp. 95-96). It is the knowledge of those general and pure conditions which must be met whenever something occurs which could be referred to as experience. 200 Peter Strawson, The Bound of Sense (Methuen & Co., 1966); Robert Paul Wolff, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1963); Jonathan Bennett, Kant's Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); Jonathan Bennett, Kant's Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). For instance, Strawson gives up as hopeless any attempt to prove genuine a priori knowledge, and contents himself with an analytic reconstruction of the categories and principles underlying what is generally accepted in the present day as knowledge. Strawson also believes that nothing more is philosophically possible. Furthermore, he rejects the entire doctrine of transcendental idealism as, in his view, manifestly unbelievable and then reconstructs what remains of Kant's doctrine as descriptive metaphysics. See especially pp. 97-117, p. 249.

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will argue that Kant's explicit aim is to establish the categories as necessary conditions of experience.201 That is, Kant sees his deduction as progressing towards the conclusion that there are universally valid categories. Support for this contention is offered primarily in the second version of the deduction. There Kant seems to be arguing that for us there is objectivity, and hence empirical knowledge, only if the categories are universally valid. What Kant says he is doing is providing a deduction of the categories, or proof of their objective validity, which since they are pure concepts, can be done only by showing their a priori applicability to experience,202 i.e., by showing that they are part of the conditions for the possibility of experience. Consequently, his strategy for proving that the categories relate to all objects of experience is to show that they are conditions of the possibility of experience.203 For a concept to be a condition of the possibility of experience is to identify it with being a condition of the possibility of objects of experience.204 Kant also implies that his strategy for proving that the categories relate of necessity, and a priori, to objects of experience will be to show that only by means of them (categories) can any object whatsoever of experience be thought.205 Strawson, Bennett and Wolffall seem to interpret the transcendental deduction as basically aiming to establish objectivity, i.e., to prove that there is an external and at least partially lawful world, a set of items distinct from one's awareness and to do this from the minimal premise that one is self-conscious. Thus, what Strawson primarily seeks to salvage from the transcendental deduction is an argument from (a), "A self-conscious being must apply concepts" to (b) "a self-conscious being

™x Critique of Pure Reason, A 94/B 126, A 111. See also B 8, B 642, B 25. 202

Ibid., A 93, A 95, B 169, B 149.

203

Ibid., A 124-5, A 126, B 161.

204

Ibid., A 111, A 158/B 197, B 234, A 202/B 247, A212/B 259-60.

205

A 212/B 259-60

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must apply objectivity - - concept." Strawson treats (a) as a premise and not as a conclusion and seems to suggest that it does not need any defence anyway.206 Strawson sees (b) as an understatement. In his view, self-consciousness ordinarily requires experience and bodily occupation of an objective realm. Strawson's view of the deduction is essentially that of having the purpose of showing against Hume that we can be certain of a lawful and therefore objective world. On this view the deduction's aim is to prove that there is something to be distinguished from the arbitrary sequence of our mental states. The only parts of the Critique which seem to be of interest to Wolff are what he called the "subjective deduction," and the "second analogy."207 He reiterates the traditional view that Kant thought of himself to be establishing the validity of mathematics and physics against the skeptical attack of Hume and emphasizes that this effort is doomed to failure if Kant begins by assuming what is at issue.208 For Wolff, this is nothing other than the "I think" of Descartes' Meditations suitably rephrased and re-interpreted.209 Through an analysis of the structure of subjective consciousness, in particular of the synthetic unity of consciousness, Kant undertakes to demonstrate that such unity could come about only as a result of the unifying activity of the cognising. With respect to method, Wolff attempts to achieve a middle path between the orthodox interpretations of Paton210 and the

206

Peter Strawson, Bound ofSense, p. 99; also 85, 86, 97.

207

Robert Paul Wolff, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity, pp. 100-134; 154164; 260-280. 208

For example, that the unity of consciousness is something that has to be proved rather than somethingfromwhich Kant can begin. 209

Robert Paul Wolff, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity, p. 105.

210

H.J. Paton, Kant's Metaphysics of Experience, 2 vols. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961). Wolff, following the preliminary work of Erich Adickes and Hans Vaihinger which culminated in the interpretation expounded in Norman Kemp Smith's Commentary, believes that there are four distinct levels of argumentation developed in the deduction in the first edition of the Critique.

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patchwork procedure of Norman Kemp Smith.211 Wolff is striving to find in Kant's transcendental deduction an argument deducing empirical knowledge from consciousness and its conditions. Bennett extracts from Kant's thoughts on the transcendental deduction something in affinity with his analytic position. Bennett sees Kant as wanting to demonstrate three things, viz., the unity of contemporaneous properties of a thing, the unity of the stages in the history of a thing, and the unity of the state of consciousness.212 At the center of his interest, however, is self-consciousness which in the given case is a reference to its own history. What is at stake is the ability to have the thought, "this is how it is with me now," a thought which presupposes "that is how it was with me then."213 Bennett, like Strawson and Wolff, believes that Kant is trying to establish that experience is objective. But Kant no where states that the transcendental deduction is to give the sufficient condition of empirical knowledge or a proof that there is an objective world. Kant conceives of the deduction as a proof that the categories relate a priori to objects of experience. He said its aim was to establish the objective validity of the categories; that is to show that these categories, though non-empirical in origin, have applications for our experiences. He endeavors to show this by establishing the conclusion that all sensible experiences must be ordered by the categories.

21

'Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary ofKant's Critique ofPure Reason (New York, 1962). Norman Kemp Smith argued at length in his study of Kant that there are four stages in the Critique of Pure Reason which are chronologically distinguishable (pp. 202 ff). Wolff who is himself admittedly following the work of Kemp Smith, refuses to commit himself to the chronological version of the theory concerning the four levels, but he does agree that the deductions can be broken down on logical grounds into four separate stages of argument. What Wolff does share with his exegetical forerunner, Kemp Smith, is the conviction that the first edition deduction constitutes the heart of the analytic, and that it is in this section that either Kant established his premise and proves his transcendental arguments concerning the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori, or he fails. 212

J. Bennett, Kant's Analytic, p. 114.

213

Ibid.,p. 105; also 109.

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Kant argues that among our concepts are some which are available for pure a priori employment in complete independence of all experience and their right to be so employed, since empirical proofs do not suffice to justify their employment.214 Thus, a deduction is an argument which tries to prove that we have or can have certain kinds of synthetic a priori knowledge. In employing this definition at the end of the B deduction Kant says: The deduction is the exposition of the pure concepts of the understanding, and therewith of all theoretical apriori knowledge, as principles of the possibility of experience.215 And in the Prolegomena Kant states: . . .a critique of reason itself must exhibit the whole stock of a priori concepts . . . together with a complete table of them, the analysis of all these concepts, with all their consequences and especially the possibility of synthetical knowledge a priori by means of a deduction of these concepts.216 The usage of the term "transcendental" in the deduction is to designate the a priori structure of the mind as the a priori faculties which are conditions for what Kant classified as knowledge. The most important usage of the term "transcendental" in the first Critique is in relationship to the element of knowledge itself. That is the Transcendental Aesthetic and the transcendental Logic. In each case only the formal conditions of knowledge are discussed. In the Aesthetic we find the formal conditions for all apprehension of the data of experience; in the logic we have the formal conditions governing the organization ofthat data. These constitute the conditions "under which alone objects of human knowledge are given" and "those under which they are thought. " 2 ' 7 Immanuel Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, A 85/B 117, p. 120. 215

Ibid.,B 168, p. 175.

21 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, trans. Lewis White Beck (Bobbs-Merrill Co.: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1959), p. 114. 217

Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, A 16/B 30, p. 62.

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In the Kantian sense, we may say, transcendental is used to refer to the ultimate necessary conditions for the possibility of experience and knowledge in general. Within this context Kant believes that the world as given in our experience and knowledge is dependent on the structure and activity of the mind. Therefore, he talks about the pure form of intuition and the a priori categories of the understanding as the ultimate necessary conditions of experience and knowledge. 218 The essential move in the first part of the deduction is an attempt to establish a reciprocal connection between the transcendental unity of apperception and the representation of an object. Kant states the principles of the transcendental unity of apperception as follows: It must be possible for the I think to accompany all my representations, for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me. That representation which can be given prior to all thought is entitled intuition. All the manifold of intuition has, therefore, a necessary relation to the I think in the same subject in which this manifold is found.219 Kant presents this as a simple principle. The argument here seems to be that representations must be capable of being my representations and meet the conditions of being elements within the unity of consciousness. As Kant writes: The transcendental unity of apperception is that unity through which the manifold in an intuition is united in the concept of the object. It is therefore entitled objective, and must be distinguished from the subjective unity of consciousness, which is a determination of inner 220

sense. 218 The purity of Kant's analysis entitles him to develop the entire system of pure speculative reason without references to anything other than the abstract principles which are capable of constituting the unity of apperception. That is, Kant can formulate the essential detail of his position without reference to any specific faculty or psychological function - - just as it makes reference to no specific empirical object. 219

Ibid.,B 131-132, pp. 152-153.

'lbid.,B 137, p. 156.

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Kant makes it clear that the transcendental unity of apperception is a necessary condition of empirical knowledge by emphasizing that the representations which cannot be unified as mine cannot be representations which amount to knowledge.221 Kant insists, however, that the purpose of the deduction is fully attained "by demonstration of the a priori validity of the categories in respect of all objects of our senses"222- -which takes place in paragraph 26 of the deduction. This statement seems to indicate Kant's intention to show that the purpose of deduction is the proof not of mere objectivity but of the validity of the categories. The deduction is carried out with the following reasoning. Wherever we find unity, this unity is itself made possible by the categories and is determined in relation to them.223 Therefore, objective judgments are valid in virtue of reference to universal conditions of human experiences as determined by the categories. In our representation of space and time, however, we have intuitions which at the same time include everything that can be presented to our senses. Quite naturally the representations of space and time have their origin in the forms of sensibility, outside of which no representations can be given to us. Here Kant is arguing along the lines of the Aesthetic that all our representations must be in space or time and we are a priori certain of the unity of space and time. Kant now suggests that since all unity (and therefore this unity too) "presupposes a synthesis which does not belong 221

Ibid.,B137,p. 156.

222

Ibid., B 145, p. 161.

223

For Kant, this unity is not merely a psychological fact. He seems to be affirming the logical necessity of the cogito as the fundamental condition of all thought and consequently, of all experience. But the cogito is not quite the simple matter which Descartes took it to be. Since there is no unity to be found in empirical consciousness per se, the unity in question comes about not simply through my accompanying each representation with consciousness, "but only in so far as I conjoin one representation with another and am conscious of the synthesis of them. (B 133)." In other words, the transcendental unity of apperception is not given in my reflection upon empirical apperception, so I have no direct awareness of it as an object. I am aware of it only insofar as I become aware of its synthetic activity.

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to the senses" but to the understanding and its categories, everything that is to be presented as determined in space or in time must conform "to the categories." We can therefore be sure that every given manifold without exception is subject to the categories. 2. Judgment, Categories and Rules The subject judges the object in accordance with the a priori categories of the understanding and the unity, identity and objectivity of the object thought is established through the transcendental unity of apperception. The subject, in short, thinks or judges and the object is thought or judged. If the fundamental doctrine of the Copernican Revolution in epistemology is that the necessary and universal characteristic of objects, if they are to be known as universal and necessary, must be due to the mind which knows, a transcendental deduction, therefore, must seek to provide the basis for establishing certain synthetic a priori propositions about the necessary conditions of experience. This is executed primarily through the categories. The categories have both an a priori application and an a priori origin. A concept has a priori application to experience when it applies with absolute necessity226 and universality. It has a priori origin when it cannot be abstracted from what is given in experience because its instance cannot be empirically given. Now it is crucial to Kant's whole position in the analytic that the categories be a priori in both senses. Unless the categories apply a priori in judgments, and unless they have a non-empirical origin, we cannot distinguish two elements in our experience, one of which is contributed by our own faculty of knowledge. For when Kant argues 224

Ibid„B161,p. 171.

225

Ibid., B 161, p. 171.

226

For Kant, all necessity must be grounded in transcendental conditions, for experience can never provide necessity of any kind. Thus, there must be a transcendental ground of the unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifold of intuitions and consequently of the concept of an object in general, a ground without which it would be impossible to think any object for our intuitions.

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that the senses alone never yield empirical knowledge of objects his only justification is that one indispensable ingredient of such knowledge, the categories, cannot be abstracted from the senses. This is because the categories need both an a priori application and origin.227 The thesis that categories apply a priori to experience, on Kant's view, involves a number of synthetic judgments which he calls principles. But as he himself indicated the very notion of such judgments is deeply paradoxical.228 As synthetic they cannot be known by an analysis of concepts and laws of logic. Nor can they be known by appealing to experience, for these judgments are known to be absolutely a priori and yet there seems to be no alternative way of establishing a judgment's validity. Kant seems to be faced with a difficult problem. How are we to justify these synthetic a priori truths which lie at the basis of all science? According to Kant, the transcendental deduction offers such a justification by demonstrating that the categories apply a priori to or in advance of all objects of experience. But we can ask the further question, what grounds the categories themselves? Kant answers: This unity, which precedes a priori all concepts of combination, is not the category of unity; for all categories are grounded in logical functions of judgment, and in these functions combination, and therefore unity of given concepts is already thought. Thus the categories already presuppose combination. We must therefore look It is true that in his Critical explanation of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments Kant began with the assumption that they actually exist in geometry and arithmetic, but this need not necessarily mean that the mere fact of their existence motivated him in his attempt to justify them through showing up the conditions of their possibility. 228

Ibid., A 84-85/B 117, pp. 120-121. The subjectivity of principles is not empirical or psychological subjectivity. This is why a higher question follows the question of fact, the question of right. It is not enough to know that, in fact we have a priori representations. We must still explain why and how these representations are necessarily applicable to experience. Why and how, the given which is presented in experience is necessarily subject to the same principle as those which govern a priori representations. This is the question of right. Representations which do not derive from experience are called a priori representations, the principle by virtue of which experience is necessarily subject to our a priori representations is called transcendental principle.

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yet higher for this unity . . . , namely, in that which itself contains the ground of the unity of diverse concepts in judgment, and therefore of the possibility of the understanding... ,229 Kant continues: "It is the unity of consciousness that alone constitutes the relation of representations to an object, and therefore their objective validity and the fact that they are modes of knowledge; and upon it therefore rests the very possibility of the understanding."230 All knowledge of objects then, according to Kant, depends upon the possibility of this synthetic unity of consciousness as a necessary condition, and hence judgments made in accordance with categorical principles must also rest ultimately on this condition.231 That which is required to make my judgment objectively valid (the synthetic unity of consciousness as embodied the judgment of apperception "I think") would be necessary for the judgment of any thinking being whose cognitive faculties are like my own.232 Kant made the self the "highest point" of transcendental philosophy, "to which we must ascribe all employment of the understanding, even the whole of logic."233 In Kant self-consciousness is a grounding principle. In it is conceived the very idea of self. Kant conceives the self as that act in which the knowing subject, abstracting from all Critique ofPure Reason, B 131, p. 152. 230

Ibid.,B 137, p. 156.

231

Ibid.,B 138, pp. 156-157.

232

It has been suggested that Kant's talk about synthesis bears some affinities to Wittgenstein's consideration of the rule governed nature of judgment. It is further suggested that Wittgenstein's argument can be used to reconstruct a valid argument for a certain kind of objectivity which excludes solipsism. See Leslie Stevenson, "Wittgenstein's Transcendental Deduction and Kant's Private Language Argument," Kant Studien, Vol 73, 1982, pp. 321-337. For other considerations for similarities between Kant and Wittgenstein on the necessary conditions for experience see Jonathan Bennett, Rationality (London, 1964), p. 75 and Kant's Analytic (Cambridge University Press, 1966 chap 5), Richard Rorty, "Strawson's Objectivity Argument", Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 24 (1970-71), pp. 207-244. 'lbid.,B 134, p. 154, Note.

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particular objects, turns back into itself and in this way becomes aware of its constant unity with itself. Self-consciousness is unique in as much as there is no distinction, here, between the one who thinks and the object of his thought. Where the self is, both the subject and this subject as its own object are present. Also we can never grasp the self as subject in isolation in the way we can do any other thing. What ever it might be when we are thinking of it, we have already presupposed the consciousness of it in our own thought and thus have turned the subject-self of which we are thinking into an object. Thus, we can only revolve around it in a perpetual circle. This means that self-consciousness, considered on its own, does not extend our knowledge of reality. The knower already contains what he grasps when he turns back into himself.234 Apperception, consciousness in general235 or original consciousness fulfills the only possible sense of objectivity in the combination of given concepts as distinguished from all subjective combinations which are only the states of the perceiving minds. Knowledge is discursive because there is no direct encounter between man and the world, only an encounter mediated by perception. The very fact that the world is an object for man is an index of human finitude. Now, it is only by becoming aware of the unity or identity of its own activity in knowing, i.e., the rule at work in the determinations of the object, that the mind becomes aware not only of the unity of the object, but of itself as well. The unity of consciousness and consciousness of unity are simply two sides of the same coin, and both are products of the synthesizing activity of the mind.236 ™* Critique ofPure Reason, A 364/B 404, A 355.

•

235

Ibid.,B143.

236

The mind that confers order in general on the data of experience is not some universal mind in which individuals participate, but simply mind as it functions in judgment. Judgment is an activity that is impersonal, a fact Kant brings out by connecting it with the abstract unity of apperception (B 141). Insofar as the content of my thoughts relates to the unity of apperception, my thinking is implicitly natural: Judgment is a declaration of what is or is meant to be the case, and what is the case is the same for all rational persons. In other words judgments result in, or at least aim at, the discovery of facts and facts hold without distinctions of persons. Given that our cognitive faculties are so

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We recognize in a concept, i.e., a rule of synthesis, not only the unity of representations and of the object represented, but the unity of the representing self as well. Here Kant articulated the thesis that consciousness of the self and the consciousness of an object are not isolated facts but mutually related conditions of one another. Self-consciousness is a pre-condition of all my representations of which I can make myself conscious as my representations. The consciousness of the identity of myself in all thinking is something that must be possible at any time if I am not to be divided into as many different selves as I have representations of which I am conscious. Only under the precondition that I am or can be conscious of some synthesis of the possible or actual states of consciousness (synthetic unity of apperception) can I be conscious of the identity of myself (analytic unity of apperception). On these kinds of self-consciousness Kant bases the judgment and the concept.237 Consequently, one of Kant's definitions of Judgments reads: "A judgment is nothing but the

constituted, it follows that the conditions which make my judgments valid for me through time, i.e., objectively, are also the conditions which would validate those same judgments for other cognitive beings. Thus, in virtue of this general fact of human cognition, it turns out that every factual objectively valid judgment is also intersubjectively valid. 237

Keith Lehrer suggests that our descendants might use some conceptual scheme utterly different than our own. Lehrer argues that no transcendental argument can ever succeed, since even if the "application of concept entails the logical impossibility of misapplication, nevertheless" no matter how well entrenched a concept may be in our beliefs about the world, it remains always and constantly subject to total rejection." Keith Lehrer "Skepticism and Conceptual Change" in Empirical Knowledge: Readings from Contemporary Sources, ed., Roderick M. Chisholm and Robert J. Swartz (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973), p. 50. For Lehrer, "any claim such as Kant's about the necessary structure of our experience neglects the ambiguity of conceptual application and conceptual change in all human thought. Ibid., p. 53. However, what Kant tries to show is that human knowledge is possible only given certain conditions. If such an argument is conclusive, what is ruled out is the possibility that there be human knowledge that does not fulfil these conditions.

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manner in which given modes of knowledge are brought to the objectivity of apperception."238 We may recall that Hume, having rejected the substantial self of traditional metaphysics, went one step further toward opposing the ontological status of the self by insisting that the identity across time of not only persons but also animals, plants, rivers, buildings, or any mass of matter, involves a definite fictitious component. But in spite of the above devastating critique, it may be proposed that Hume never doubted his own existence in some modest form or other as a bundle of perceptions, and it is precisely that tacit feature of his thought that he seems to find incapable of reconciling with the principle that the mind never perceives any real connection among distinct experience. Hume insisted that no casual episode can be merely a local affair, separated from the rest of the universe. It has cosmic import that transcends the case at hand. In the Chapter in the Treatise on "Personal Identity," he commented that "no question in philosophy being more abstruse than that concerning the nature of the uniting principle which constitutes a person . . . we must have recourse to the most profound metaphysics to give a satisfactory answer to it."239 There is a sense in which Kant can be seen as giving a definitive answer to Hume's problem. The answer is found in the transcendental unity of apperception. This unity has two sides. It has an objective side and a subjective side. On the subjective side, the unity is grounded in the threefold synthesis of apprehension, reproduction and recognition. On the objective side, it is no mere natural relation that constitutes it, it is rather an epistemic relation for it consists above all in thinking an object. The pure concept par excellence is the concept of an object. The central feature in Kant's Transcendental deduction here is the claim that this unity necessary for the self-ascription of experience at the same time requires conceptualization of one's experience in terms of the concept of a possible object of experience. Thus, all knowledge gets its legitimization from experience.

Critique ofPure Reason, B 141. 239

A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (1888), Book 1, Pt. 4, Sec. 2.

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This restriction of knowledge to the area of possible experience can be regarded as the common core of 'empiricism' and Kant's transcendental philosophy. One of the purely negative aspects of the critical philosophy is the re-interpretation of the metaphysics of the self and its foundationalist account of self-knowledge. The rational psychologist holds the Cartesian doctrine that to think about ourselves is to know apodictically that we are substantial non-composite, self-identical subjects of experience. Rational psychology purports to be a science built upon the single non-bodily referring proposition "I think"240 - - a proposition in which knowledge and being coincide. Since the self knows nothing better than itself it can posit itself as the object of knowledge while remaining the same - - self of that knowledge. It suffers no original delay, distancing or circulatory when it knows itself. That which says "I think" is precisely the "I" which thinks.241 This account of experience reduces the knower to a passive recipient. For Kant, the 'I think' has a purely "logical" employment; it can never be used as a premise by a philosopher to generate any ontological conclusion whatsoever. Kant holds that the fundamental discontinuity between the being of man and his selfhood are to be explained in terms of a given structural disequilibrium at the heart of human being. He argues that "I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself. The consciousness of self is thus very far from being a knowledge of the self."242 Consciousness is not for itself its own object, and even if I could see myself clearly and distinctly as an object, what I would see would not be the adequate representation of what I am in myself. We are unable to know ourselves in the very act of knowing as we are unable to simultaneously see ourselves seeing. Self-knowledge, for Kant, involves a self-directing movement rather than a self-coinciding one. We know ourselves through the categories and not as absolutely proximate and self-present. Even in selfknowledge man is a being of distances at once revealing and concealing

^Critique ofPure Reason, A 343/B 401. 'Ibid., A 402. 2

Ibid.,B158.

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himself. Self-knowledge is not a matter of having our beliefs determined by being brought face to face with the object of belief. By putting the self that can be known on the same epistemological level as objects the Cartesian identification of the self with an epistemological foundation was severed, and a clear disjunction was introduced between the being of man and his selfhood. The self-knower who holds that knowledge conforms to its object is not only wrong but deceived if his goal is the complete one-to-one correspondence between, on the one hand objectively validated propositions, and on the other, an independently existing reality (the self). Kant is insistent that we can know ourselves in terms of appearances but we cannot know what we really are over and above the empirical contingent and finite knowledge we have. Indeed when self-knowledge purports to be total, rational, or foundational, the self-knower is attempting to evade his or her own agency and contingency. Thus a Copernican turn is required. The thing which is known is relative to the knower. The fact that we only know ourselves through the categories rather than directly corresponds to the basic belief that knowledge and experience suffer from a structural inability to coincide with their own source.243 The human person has the peculiarity of being both that which confers meaning and that which is given meaning. As a result of the reflexive situation that is characteristic of the self-knower by virtue of his unstable self-relation he is a being who is neither independent from his self-knowing activities nor completely coincident with them. Man's being is alienated from itself and haunted by an epistemological wholeness attainable only by a divine intelligence. One of the distinguishing features of human as opposed to divine intelligence is the unavoidable non-coincidence and self-distancing involved in self knowledge. Divme intelligence absolutely presents itself, thinks itself immediately in rational intuition; human intelligence simultaneously revealing and concealing itself is constrained to think about itself.244

243

Ibid.,B 158, note.

244 Ever since Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind it has been widely accepted that belief in particular and mind in general involves a definite dispositional component.

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Knowledge is a relationship between a subject and an object. In the Copernican framework for epistemology, the knowledge of the object is the result, the starting point to the knowing process being the subject. Hence the question: How can a subject acquire knowledge of the object? Or, in the Kantian terms "how subjective conditions of thought can have objective validity"?"245 How does the object reach the subject? Kant held his predecessors responsible for having impeded any progress in metaphysics by having conceived the understanding as an autonomous faculty. The understanding can only be used with sensibility, if knowledge is to be obtained at all. As a result, there is no object which can arise from only the use of the understanding. For Kant, the objective reality of a concept for the purpose of knowledge does not mean that the object designated by a concept must actually be given, that is, must be real but rather that the object designated by it must be possible in accordance with the condition of all experience. Kant tries to demonstrate that the activity ofjudgment presupposes a priori concepts which, because of their essential role in judgment,246 deserve categorical status. It shows that the exercise of certain judgmental functions requires certain concepts. These concepts are "pure" in the sense that they are derived from the very nature of the understanding and have no reference to the spatio-temporal manifold of human experience. So far, this analysis does not carry with it any implications regarding the objective247 or empirical reality of these concepts. The fundamental 245

'Critique of Pure Reason, A 89/B 122.

246

Judgment is the synthesis of a predicate and a subject, i.e., of two concepts, by being the synthesis of a concept and of an intuition. The latter gives an object and that is why judging is constitutive of what Kant calls an object. 247

There are two senses in which a judgment can be called objective. In one sense, a judgment is objective if it is about objects - - independent, re identifiable particulars. In another, a judgment is objective if there are criteria by which its truth value can be assessed. Logical and mathematical judgments, are judgments about how things appear to the percipient, and can all be objective in the second sense without being about objects. Peter Strawson seems not to give due recognition to this distinction when he tries to argue that we must have experience of an objective world (i.e., of objects) as the basis of

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point is simple, namely, that we cannot move directly from the premise that a given concept functions as a condition of judgment of a certain logical form, to the conclusion that this concept has any applicability to the data of human experience. A different situation takes place in the transcendental Aesthetic, where Kant moved more directly and non-problematically from the assertion of the function of space and time as sensible conditions of human knowledge to the assertion of their empirical reality. This is precisely why a transcendental deduction is necessary. As he puts it: In the metaphysical deduction the a priori origin of the categories has been proved through their complete agreement with the general logical functions of thought; in the transcendental deduction we have shown their possibility as a priori modes of knowledge of objects of an intuition in general.248 Such a transcendental deduction makes knowledge possible by showing how pure concepts, although not abstracted from experience, can however, be used in mastering that experience. Synthetic propositions which are composed of pure categories must relate to a fact by which the combination of such concepts in the propositions can be justified. But since pure categories refer only to an object in general there can be no fact in experience by reference to which we can justify their combination in the propositions. As Kant repeatedly states, these propositions are verified only by reference to the possibility of experience.

the consideration that we must be able to differentiate how things really are from how they seem to be {The Bound of Sense, pp. 89 ff). 241 'Critique of Pure Reason, B 159, 170. The metaphysical deduction is one kind of transcendental argument, but it does not have the burden of proving the objectivity thesis. Its task is the prior task of identifying and justifying the system of categories as an exhaustive and exclusive set of primitive concepts that correspond to the a priori logical functions of judgment and that in turn functions as necessary principles of synthesis for the empirical manifold of intuition. It does not prove, nor is it designed to prove that categorical concepts have objective validity in the sense required for the objectivity theses. Its purpose is to yield the transcendental clue to the discovery of all pure concepts of understanding. A 67/B 92-A 83/B 109.

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Now pure concepts are not merely fanciful entities conjured up by the imagination, but are dependent on certain ultimate ways of looking at the world. That is why they are called categories. Kant has now brought us to the threshold by these concepts of how to devise concepts or rules for devising rules.249 The only way to introduce synthetic unity into a manifold of content of consciousness is by reproducing them in the imagination according to a rule. A feature of the deduction, therefore, is that without the command of these concepts it would not be possible to convey information about things and states of affairs the way we usually do.250 We are led to the conclusion that: The order and regularity in the appearance which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce.251 We ourselves are the author of order and regularity. Since the sources cannot be found in intuitions, the categories can only be established a priori; that is, they must already be present in the original cognitive source of the mind. Indeed, "categories are concepts which prescribe laws a priori to appearances, and therefore to nature, the sum of all appearance."252 Common to all categories is that one does not discover them through experience. They constitute the form of experience itself. So, far from

249

Ibid.,A106ff.

250

Karl Jaspers, referring to Kant as the absolutely indispensable philosopher, traces the beginning of the momentous revolution in philosophical inquiry as follows: Kant requires us in thinking by categories - - and, according to him we cannot think otherwise - - to grasp something which does not fall under the categories. This he had to do, since he wanted to touch the origin of all objectivity which itself could not be objective. Thus I think a nonobjectively objectivity, that which grounds the categories including that of unity, under the category of unity. [Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existence trans. William Earle (Noonday Press, 1955), p. 113]. 251

Kant, Critique ofPure Reason, A 125, p. 147, B 165, p. 173.

,2

Ibid., B163,p. 172.

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constituting the content of experience, they determine the structure of that content, and not only do the categories determine the structure of the form of experience, they are, at the same time, the necessary conditions of all experience. Thus Kant said: If I am to pass a priori beyond the concept of an object, I can do so only with the help of some special guidance, supplied from outside this concept . . . In transcendental knowledge so long as we are concerned only with concepts of the understanding, our guide is the possibility of experience. Such proof does not show that the given concept (for instance, ofthat which happens) leads directly to another concept (that of cause); for such a transition would be a saltus which could not be justified. The proof proceeds by showing that experience itself, and therefore the object of experience, would be impossible without a connection of this kind.253 The transcendental deduction sets the stage for the second analogy. It points to the fact that the transcendental method produces some general requirements and that a further pursuit of the same method will eventually produce more specific ones. For instance: all alternations in the phenomenal world, which we take to be objective, must take place in accordance with rules. 254

253

Ibid, A 782-3/B 810-11.

254

Ibid.,A189-94/B223-9.

CHAPTER SIX: CAUSALITY AND OBJECTIVITY In the transcendental deduction Kant says he is providing a proof or justification of the objective validity of the categories which, since they are pure concepts, can be done only by showing their a priori applicability to experience, i.e., by showing that they are part of the necessary conditions of the "possibility of experience,"255 where 'experience' is defined as empirical knowledge.256 The question to which Kant addresses his argument is whether appearances universally obey synthetic principles. His answer was expressly dependent on the use of the notion of possible experience. He says there is no direct proof or happening to legitimacy of the causal law. The argument of the analytic must demonstrate the fact that an event needs to be empirically knowable in order for it to establish the maxim.257 But how can the categories, which have their seat in the nature of the human understanding, apply to what is sensibly given to the mind, that is, to appearances? How can the categories apply to the things given in the senses? There can be no more legitimate or serious problem for a general theory that maintains the importance of a priori features of experience. The schemata (the true and sole conditions under which these concepts obtain relation to objects and so possesses significance) outline a solution to this problem. Transcendental philosophy according to Kant concerns itself with the system of a priori concepts of objects as

'Critique of Pure Reason A 93, p. 126; A 95, p. 129; B 166, p. 174. 'Ibid, B 149, B 161. 'Ibid., B 765. !

Ibid.,A146/B185,p. 186.

'Ibid., A 12.

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The concepts are "entirely independent of all experience." But what kind of "before" are we here talking about when we say "before all experience"? Knowledge has to do with objects. As such it cannot in principle get before, or "behind" the object, no matter what its nature may be. Every attempt to know a thing before the act of knowing would again have an object, even if modified, and would again be knowing. Hegel has shown this process of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Mind. Consciousness moves as a process within which a particular "new true object" for knowledge originates. Knowing "before" all knowing would be a self-contradictory concept. These remarks, however, accurate though they may be, fail in as much as they claim to represent a critique of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to take into account the main Kantian thesis. For Kant, primary transcendental doctrine does not aim for a knowing before all knowing or before all experience. It also does not aim for a knowledge of subjectivity in the sense of a self-knowledge of knowing as a tool. Rather, the transcendental method of thought aims for a logic of the genesis of the object of experience, for a logic of truth as Kant clearly states.260 And for Kant the definitive answer to the question "What is truth" cannot be ultimately or adequately explained within the realm of formal logic.261 What is thought by the logician to be quite obvious, that is, that truth is the agreement of cognition with its object, is precisely what Kant transforms into the problem. In other words, he is asking just what it means to have cognition and a corresponding object and to say that they agree or do not agree. The proposed logic is supposed to provide a framework within which the question about the nature of truth would 260

Ibid., B 78 ff.

261

Kant writes that "the sphere of logic is quite precisely delimited; its sole concern is to give an exhaustive exposition and a strict proof of the formal rules of thought" (B IX). Man's success in making a science of logic is due entirely to the fact that the logician is found to abstract "from all objects of knowledge and their differences"; consequently, in logic the understanding has to deal solely with itself and its form (B IX). Given the immediate context of these remarks, Kant seems to be expressing the belief that logic deals only with those fundamental rules and principles in accordance with which a finite rational creature must consider any set of facts or propositions. See A 52/B 76, A 54/B 78). Thus, he takes it as a given that logic is a strictly a priori science that serves as a propaedeutic to all other investigations.

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become meaningful. It does not, however, have the meaning it might appear to have at first glance. It is not the question about truth as opposed to falsehood. For truth, taken in this sense, could only be stated in terms of particular cognition, which would mean that the question would again have to be dealt with in terms of formal logic. Within transcendental logic the question what is truth comes to mean the same as the question about the nature of cognition. It is asking what defines cognition as such. Truth as opposed to falsehood has no relevance in this context. It was Fichte who expanded and radicalized the task of transcendental philosophy beyond a transcendental critique of the faculty of reason toward a doctrine of transcendental freedom. Fichte did not intend merely a critical legitimization of the knowledge of objects nor even a critical definition of what constitutes the moral character of action. He aimed toward a comprehension of all cognition - - theoretical as well as practical. Even though he speaks of a "science of cognition" his "science of knowledge" cannot be understood as a higher or highest type of knowledge beyond all finite knowledge, but rather as a comprehending of all cognitions, including a highest cognition, which may possibly be regarded as idea in the Kantian sense. For Kant, the inquiry into transcendental conditions of human action is a rational one. The answering of such enquiry does not lead to metaphysical insight but rather to the comprehending of action as rational.262 The text of schematism reflects Kant's insistence on the distinction between sensibility and understanding as two sources of knowledge. In the brief section entitled "Transcendental Judgment in General" which serves as an introduction to the Analytic of Principles, Kant states that the schematisn provides the sensible conditions under which alone pure concepts of the understanding can be employed.263 22

In the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant presents those concepts and basic principles of the pure understanding that a priori ground the object of experience and objective knowledge of it. This analytic is in itself not objective knowledge but sets forth a logical construct ("a logic of truth") that is designated transcendental because it has to do with the pre-objective syntheses of intuitions through pure concepts. But if there are such capacities, how do they find employment in respect to intuition and appearances? Ibid., A 136/B 175.

102 Causality and Objectivity Kant's doctrine of schematism can be described as follows. For Kant the imagination functions empirically. Empirically an image is created out of a collection of impressions which we happen to have at any particular time. This is the "certain content" of inner sense. In order that this be an object of cognition, however, it must be brought to order in accordance with certain necessary and unchanging forms and this task is performed by the transcendental imagination. Here, the procedure of imagination is schematic: by means of it the (pure) categories become schematized, i.e., the transcendental imagination in its schematic procedure produces a schema for each category such that it becomes materially operative. But generally speaking the schemata, as transcendental time determinations, are the conditions under which the categories are brought to bear on inner sense. Time is determined in a number of ways so that sensible intuition is received under various temporal modes in accordance with the categories. Because time is not empirical it may serve to schematize the categories. Nothing empirical could provide the connection which is presumed to be a precondition of the empirical. Thus the chapter on the schematism is concerned with temporalization of the categories requisite for their cognitive employment. Since the categories are the conditions under which objects can appear to consciousness, the transcendental synthesis of the imagination is objective - - it establishes the manifold of time as a network of relations between objects. However, we must turn to the principles and specifically to the analogies of experience for a solution of how the categories can have application to the things given in the senses. Kant begins his argument by reviewing his highly technical concept of experience. Kant's notion of the world is essentially related to his analysis of experience. The world at issue is the world of possible experience and, correlatively, what sets experience - - in the full Kantian sense - - apart from mere representations is that experience is a world. The central theme from which Kant develops both his notion of a world and that of experience is synthesis. The representation of a world is not an aggregation of representations but a single unified synthesis of representations. Kant's claim is that it is only by being conceptually structured through the categories that representations can be (for us) elements of such a unitary synthesis. If it is a genuine knowledge it must claim certainty, and if it rested entirely upon empirical data it could not do so.

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Experience is an empirical knowledge, that is, a knowledge which determines an object through perceptions.264 Hence a knowledge which is both certain and empirical must determine its object in some way. At this point Kant introduces Hume's problem:265 in experience perceptions come together in only an accidental order so that no necessity determining their connection can be revealed in the perceptions themselves. Kant's central argument turns on what is required for knowing directly the occurrence of any event. No one knows the occurrence of a certain event without knowing the existence of a certain state and of its previous non-existence. No one knows directly the existence of a certain state without observing it, but observation of a certain state does not suffice to enable someone to know that it has come about. Kant points out that no one can directly know that a certain state he or she has observed was preceded by a time in which it did not exist without a further observation in which that state did not present itself.266 The connections in question here between events are not the intelligible connections for which rationalist philosophers like Descartes sought. All Kant is claiming is that, when an event occurs, there must be some preceding event upon which it follows according to a rule, and the way to explain this occurrence is by a transcendental proof. There is no question here of our being able to attain insight into the working of nature. The proof runs as follows. First it is shown by an analysis of the perception of a succession of appearances what it means to perceive an event. In this the perceiver is conscious of the states A and B one after the other and connects the representations of A with the representations of B which are both given empirically. But this combination as a connection of the contents of my consciousness depends on my ™ Critique of Pure Reason, A 176/ B218, p. 208. 265

Hume's problem teaches us that cumulative experience is unable to justify any universal laws. Kant asked what are the preconditions of experience and found among these preconditions the synthesis by which we, the subjects of knowledge, arrange our sense-impressions in theframeof objects in space and time. 'Critique ofPure Reason, A 192/B 237, p. 221.

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imagination and, therefore, is arbitrary insofar as the position of the representations in time is concerned.267 Whether I am conscious of the representation of A before B, or B before A is left open when they are taken merely as representations which are the content of my inner sense and its form, time. This follows from the nonperceptibility of time itself as an empty form of succession. It is impossible to decide empirically by a comparison of the perceptions A and B which one is the earlier and which is the later one in time. Thus it is up to the individual which he or she represents as the earlier and which as the later one. As far as the connection of two representations in empirical consciousness is concerned, that is, as far as inner sense and its form, time, are concerned there is no possibility of knowing the relation of the state which corresponds to the representations empirically. By mere perception, experience of objects is not possible. In the Transcendental Aesthetic Kant links time specifically with inner sense.268 Taken in connection with other aspects of Kant's position, the contention that time cannot be a determination of outer appearances seems to involve contra-diction. Kant repeatedly insists that we must appeal to outer intuition and its form, space, in order to represent time. In fact, he makes this very point immediately after the passage cited above when he remarks: "And just because this inner intuition yields no shape, we endeavor to make up for this want by analogies".269 These analogies as expected all turn out to be spatial. For example, we are constrained to represent time in terms of a line. Also the Analogies of Experience are concerned with the conditions of the experience of an objective temporal order of appearances. These appearances certainly include objects in space. The core of Kant's doctrine seems to be that self awareness through inner sense is simply awareness of the flow of our own conscious life as manifested in the flow of the objects of outer sensibility, qua pure intentional objects. Conceptualization of such objects in terms of our concepts of material reality may thus be said to involve the

Ibid.,A192/B237,p.221. 'Ibid., A 33/B 49-50. 'Ibid., A 33 B 49-50.

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"determination" of inner sense by reference to outer perception. When dealing with the object of inner sense one is not dealing with a domain of objects distinct from the realities outside ourselves. In most cases the objects of inner sense are in fact realities existing in space. It is simply that we abstract from that reality when we are concerned with inner sense. That is part of what it means to say that we are then concerned only with inner sense. The second step of the proof consists in showing that empirical knowledge of an objective event is possible only if one presupposes that the relation of the two states is so determined as to make it necessary to posit A before or after B. That is, only if the time-relation of the state is taken to be determined by the relation of cause and effect (i.e., the concept of causality) can I know objective events empirically. The third part of the proof draws consequences from the unknowability of events by mere perception and from the requirement of a concept of the necessary connectedness of the appearances in order that there be an objective event for me. Here it is suggested that only in so far as we subject the succession of appearances, and therefore all alteration, to the law of causality; and, as likewise follows, the appearances, as objects of experience, are themselves possible only in conformity with the law.270 Here Kant is arguing from the need to represent the connection of appearances in order to regard the succession of appearances as combined in an object to the role of the category in supplying the necessity of the connection. This seems to be the central argument of the second analogy. In the A edition of the Critique Kant states his principle of causation as follows: Everything that happens, that is, begins to be, presupposes something upon which it follows according to a rule.271 In the B edition of the Critique, the principle asserts that:

Vritique ofPure Reason, B 234, p. 219. Ibid. p. 218.

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Causality and Objectivity [All] alternation takes place in conformity with the law of the connection of cause and effect.272

The B version makes it clear that the rules governing changes are causal rules. The function of the concept of causality "expresses the necessity of an event under a presupposed condition."273 This, therefore, is the rule in accordance with which we must unite our representations in the objective unity of self-consciousness if they are to yield a consciousness of succession. Thus, Kant concludes in one of his most precise formulations of the causal principle: If, then, we experience that something happens, we in so doing always presuppose that something precedes it, on which it follows according to a rule. Otherwise I would not say of the object that it follows. For mere succession in my apprehension, if there be no rule determining the succession in relation to something that precedes, does not justify me in assuming any succession in the object. I render my subjective synthesis of apprehension objective only by reference to a rule in accordance with which the appearances in their succession, that is, as they happen, are determined by the preceding state. The experience of an event (i.e. of anything as happening) is itself possible only on this assumption.274 Within the context of the proof of the causal principle the assumption is made that there are objective events to be empirically known. The objective necessity of the concept of causality is only then established when it has been shown that these objective events, presupposed in this proof, cannot exist, if they are not such necessary and universal conditions of temporally succeeding things as they are supposed to be according to the concept of the causal relation. The proof is given under the precondition that it is possible to know objects by experiences. The argument can be considered as follows: all event-perception requires successive perceptions of an object, but this is merely a

272

Ibid.

273

Ibid.,B168.

274

Ibid.,A195/B240,p.223.

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necessary and not a sufficient condition of event-perception. The sufficient condition of event perception also requires the perception of successive states of the object and (since all apprehension is successive) this can never be determined on the basis of the successiveness of the perceptions themselves since perception is insufficient for empirical knowledge of events.275 The conclusion that it is the concept of causality which makes possible the experience which is presupposed is valid under the two additional presuppositions: (1) that we can know objects which correspond to representations given to us successively; and (2) that the objectivity of these objects is possible only by the categories. A justification of the categories as a necessary requirement of objective knowledge and therefore of the possibility of experience in general is here legitimately presupposed, because it has been given in the deduction of the categories. The presupposition that objects corresponding in a determined way to our successive representations can be known by experience is equivalent to the presupposition that the categories have been shown to be objectively valid. What corresponds to the categories can only be a formal characteristic of the appearances and not simply an appearance. For all empirically given representations cannot as such be anticipated or even produced by the understanding. The one accomplishment of the understanding as a faculty of knowledge can therefore only be such as to prescribe a determinate form to the representations. Thus the categories are the condition of objectivity in general. They provide the rules of synthesis and serve therefore as criteria for deciding which phenomena will count as objects and which will not. So far it would seem that the proof of the causal principle has been analytic and proceeded by a search for the conditions of a certain experience presupposed at the beginning of it. However, Hume had shown that the principle that every event has cause could not be 275 Event-perception involves the perception of something as happening or changing. Whatever may be the specific states of that change, any change essentially involves the combination of opposing states. There is a recognition that a state now obtaining did not obtain earlier. We cannot differentiate in purely subjective terms between having just begun to notice something that has existed previously and noticing something that has just begun. In either case there is a succession in apprehension, hence, the two cases are subjectively equivalent.

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analytically true, for no contradiction ensues if we suppose it to be false. Nor can the principle be known to be true a posteriori; for the claim that it makes extends beyond the powers of our actual experience to verify. From these two facts Hume concluded that the principle could not be known to be true at all; that if we accepted it our acceptance would have to be based on faith or custom, not on reason or experience. Hume's doubts concerning causality presuppose the perceptions of events and questions only the projection of observed regularities to the unobserved. His construction of the origin of our belief in causation follows upon his criticism of the rationality of this notion. Kant questions the proposition by arguing that we are entitled to take the succession of our inner state of consciousness as having objective validity. For instance as representations of what is going on in the world. It is not that we see events and think that the regularities to which they so far conform will be continued in the future. But rather, there is no perception of events at all until there is an objective ground to regard what is given in sense as representing what happens in nature. Hume's argument has two aspects; the particular one of how given experienced events may be connected with another, and the general problem involved in it of how any event may be necessarily connected with another. In the Treatise Hume distinguishes the general from the particular problem in the following way: First, for what reason we pronounce it necessary that everything whose existence has a beginning should also have a cause, that such particular causes must necessarily have such particular effects; and what is the nature ofthat inference we drawfromone another, and of the belief we repose in it?276 David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. with an analytical Index by L. A. Silby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Book II, Part III, Section III. In the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section IV, Part I (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1976) Hume raised the problem of how we can know any necessary or inseparable and inviolable connection between experienced things. He searched our familiar experience and returned with the verdict that no such necessary and inviolable connection was to be found in our sensory impressions. Kant agreed with this answer, but in his response found such necessary connection in the concept and principles indispensable to experience. The problem which Hume posed for Kant can be stated in two versions. The Temporal Version: How can we logically deduce predictions for the future from observations made in the past? The Logical version: How can we infer universal judgmentsfromparticular experience? Hume and Kant were

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Hume showed that the belief in such a connection was mere dogmatism. He showed that no sense experience could validate the existence of such connection. From the fact that a certain event happened or occurred it was impossible to justify an inference about the occurrence of the successive events. The mere fact that one had observed that a certain event always had been succeeded by another event does not prove that it was something that had to have happened. There is no justification therefore to infer that the next time the former event occurs the latter would follow. Hume concluded that not only was it impossible to obtain knowledge of a necessary connection between a cause and its effects, but also that no such connection exists. In Hume's view, causal connection and material substance appear to be ontologically gratuitous - - or at least epistemically suspect. He contends that we learn of the world entirely through our senses and that they acquaint us directly with only the sensory evident features of things and their changing states. Connections among change states and substance in which things inhere are not given to us through sense experience. Thus we are invited to question these extensions, and any defence we might make of them must meet the challenge of Hume's skeptical arguments.277 Kant's response is that we can know a certain sequence to be objective only if it is subsumable under some law:

aware of the insolubility of this problem. We cannot correctly draw any one of these two inferences. Hume's reaction is a skepticism which accepts a psychological explanation but no justification for our belief in natural laws. Kant was convinced that these laws must admit a justification. Hence he had to believe that there is cognition which does not rely on experience. For him, ideas a priori are epistemologically necessary. But how are they possible? According to Kant, our ideas a priori are made by ourselves. The mental act by which they are made is an example of what Kant calls synthesis. 277

Hume builds his whole theory of mind around the occurrences of perceptions which he divides into the two species: impressions and ideas. Asked to account for the peculiar nature of belief - - to explain what it is to assent or to dissentfroman idea, as opposed to merely entertaining it - - Hume replies that it is to contemplate the idea in question with a special sort of feeling.

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Causality and Objectivity In other words, that which follows or happens must follow in conformity with a universal rule upon that which was contained in the preceding state.278

This law of our sensibility states that time, which underlies all perceptions and their connections through me, has itself a formal characteristic.279 In the whole of time any subsequent time is necessarily determined by the preceding time. I get to a later time only through the one preceding it, because the later time itself is solely possible by the preceding time by which it even becomes necessary. The parts of time as far as they represent an ordered succession make the concept of progress in time sensible and are for their part the condition for everything which appears to us occurring in time. Thus: That something happens is, therefore, a perception which belongs to a possible experience. This experience becomes actual when I regard the appearance as determined in its position in time, and therefore as an object that can always be found in the connection of perceptions in accordance with a rule. This rule, by which we determine something according to succession of time, is, that the condition under which an event invariably and necessarily follows is to be found in what •..!• precedes the event.280 Everything, therefore, that happens has a cause or is effected by something upon which it necessarily follows. Kant's aim here is to prove that a certain form of the principle of sufficient reason, namely, the principle of causality, is a synthetically necessary statement - - it is not derived from the laws of contradiction. Yet it is knowable a priori as true. What then are the main steps in the Kantian argument? Generally speaking Kant thought himself to have established conceptual connections between three fundamental ideas or sets of concepts. The attempt is made to link up the idea embodied in the principle itself, namely, law likeness or uniformities in the behavior of objects, with the idea of objective, as opposed to subjective, time

21i

Critique ofPure Reason, A 200/ B 245, p. 226.

279

Ibid., A199/B244,p. 225.

'Ibid., A 200/ B 246, p. 226.

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relations and in turn to connect this idea with that of the unity of consciousness. This argumentation is for itself sufficient to prove the causal law (synthetically). In it no (analytic) use is made of the de facto impossibility of a reversal in the series of our perceptions which follow from the assumed objectivity of a perceived event. Lewis White Beck attributes to Kant the view that wherever an event occurs after another it is impossible for someone to obtain the observations by which he knows of them in a different order.281 It is from this irreversibility of observation that Beck claims that Kant draws a valid argument for the Second Analogy. The argument based on such irreversibility is Kant's main argument for the Second Analogy according to Prichard, Kemp Smith, Ewing, Lovejoy and Strawson.282 By showing the argument to be a non sequitur Prichard, Strawson, and Lovejoy claim to have refuted Kant. According to Beck, Kant holds that whenever one event occurs after another, it is impossible for someone to observe both events in reverse order; and from this Kant argues to the Second Analogy. Kant is, according to his critics, wrong on two counts. He is wrong in holding that the order in which observations are obtained always follows the order in which the events occur. Kant is also wrong in concluding that when the order of the events causes the order in which they are observed, there must also be some cause for the events. According to Lovejoy, the bulk of the Second Analogy contains nothing more than a restatement of Wolffs283 281

Lewis White Beck, Essays on Kant and Hume, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 133. 282

See: H. A. Prichard, Kant's Theory of Knowledge (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1909; reprint ed. New York: Garland, 1976, esp. chap. 12; cf. 291; Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1929, p. 368; A. C. Ewing, Kant's Treatment of Causality (London: Kegan Paul, 1924), p.92; P. Strawson, The Bound of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 137; Arthur Lovejoy, "On Kant's Reply to Hume," in Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. Moltke S. Gram (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), pp. 248-308. 283

Kant once referred to Christian Wolff as "the greatest among the dogmatic philosophers." He was the head of a movement for which all philosophical thinking culminated in a rational metaphysics that claimed to get knowledge about a non-perceptible transcendental world. It is well known that

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proof of the principle of sufficient reason. In spite of Kant's claim to the contrary,284 it is thus analytic and dogmatic rather than synthetic and critical. The only exception which Lovejoy will allow to this is the step where Kant moves from the reflection that in every instance of event perception the order of perceptions is determined and thus irreversible, to the conclusion that every event follows from a preceding state of affairs in accordance with a universal and necessary law. Lovejoy acknowledges the originality of this step, but he proceeds to dismiss it as "one of the most spectacular examples of the non sequitur which are to be found in the history of philosophy."285 Strawson makes much the same point calling the move a non sequitur of "numbing grossness".286 Like Lovejoy, he is willing to acknowledge to Kant that in the experience of an event the order of perceptions is determined or irreversible and "in this sense necessary". Kant's problem, however, is that he erroneously believes that, Kant originally stood very much under the influence of this philosophy, while in his critical stage the kind of metaphysics which was advocated by Wolff had become impossible for him. It is important to note that Wolff worked out a pure rational foundation of Newton's theory. This was done in two steps. We find the first step in his ontology. It consists in an alleged proof of the principle of sufficient reason. In this proof he concludes that: Either nothing is without sufficient reason why it exists rather than not or there is something which can exist without sufficient reason why it is rather than is not. Suppose there is an A for which there is no sufficient reason why A exists rather than not. Therefore nothing is assumed as beingfromwhich it becomes conceivable why A is. It is therefore admitted that A exists because the nothing is assumed as being. As this is absurd - - namely because of the lemma which forbids statement about the nothing whereas there, a statement about it is made - - "there is nothing without sufficient reason. Wolffs second step is his foundation of the Newtonian mechanics consisted in the attempt to derive within his "General Cosmology" the axioms of Newtonfromthe principle of sufficient reason. Kant believed that this result was also obtained surreptitiously. 2M

Critique ofPure Reason, B 265.

285

Lovejoy, "On Kant's Reply to Hume," Kant: Disputed Questions, p.

303. 'Strawson, The Bound ofSense, p. 137.

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to conceive this order of perceptions as necessary is equivalent to conceiving the transition or changefromA to B as itself necessary, as falling, that is to say, under a rule or law of causal determination; it is equivalent to conceiving the transition as preceded by some condition such that an event of that type invariably and necessarily follows upon a condition ofthat type.287 Here, according to Strawson, lies the non sequitur, which he traces to Kant's illicit and unwitting shift from a conceptual to a causal notion of necessity. But Strawson and company miss the point. The irreversibility thesis does not pertain to the order in which perceptions are apprehended in "empirical consciousness" but rather to the order in which they are conceptualized in a judgment concerning objective succession. To regard perceptions as irreversible is just to subject them to an a priori rule, which in this case must be the schema of causality. As a condition of the possibility of the experience of an objective succession, the schema (criterion) is also a condition of the succession itself (as an object of possible experience). The schema thus has "objective reality" which is just what the argument is intended to prove. Indeed, on the basis of the argument being presented here by Kant, the irreversible order of appearance is based upon a formal characteristic of time itself which prescribes a law for the appearances. The function the irreversibility thesis plays in Kant's argument is to provide a schema of the concept of an event. All objective consciousness, Kant has shown, involves a consciousness of necessity, and irreversibility is the peculiar kind of necessity involved in event consciousness. As a mode of necessity it is determined by a rule, and the problem is thus to determine the particular rule or principle by means of which apprehension is bound down in instances of event perceptions. This rule would then be a necessary condition of the possibility of experiencing an event, and all events would necessarily be subject to it insofar as they are to be the objects of possible experience. Kant's solutions and the mam thesis of the second analogy is that the concept of causality is the desired rule. However, this is not to say that there can be no temporally succeeding perceptions the sequence of which depends on our choice. It means, however, that only those perceptions are perceptions of an Ibid., p. 138.

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objective event that correspond to the formal characteristic of time. All other perceptions have only a subjective significance, whether they stand in a reversible order or are de facto associations of representations or whether they are uniformly repeating combinations of facts. Their perceptions selected from the set of all combinations of perceptions according to that criterion of regulated succession are obviously not given by our thought nor by time itself. They are found empirically. In this experiment only that which "can always be found in the connection of perceptions in accordance with a rule"288 is regarded as an object. Critical to Kant's argument in defense of this principle is the fact that all change takes place in time. For if an event "were to follow upon an empty time" i.e., if there were nothing antecedent to the event upon which it follows according to some law, then the event would be as incomprehensible as empty time itself289 or as a creation out of nothing and we would be aware only of a play of ideas290 that has no objective validity whatsoever. That something may happen is but an anticipation of a possible experience. The experience becomes actual when antecedent conditions determine its occurrence at a specific time in accordance with discernible laws.291 That is to say, the condition under which an event invariably and necessarily follows is to be found in what precedes the event292 and determines its occurrence in time.293 The parts of time as

™ Critique ofPure Reason, B 245. 289

Ibid.,A192/B239.

290

Ibid.,A194/B239,A196/B241. See also Prolegomena, p. 57.

291

Ibid., A 200/B 246, p. 226.

"•

292

Ibid.,A200/247.

293 In his book Kant's Analogy of Experience (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1973) Arthur Melnick proposes an ambitious reconstruction of Kant's argument based on general requirements for objective time determinations. He sees these considerations as the unifying heart of all three analogies. He reconstructs the arguments of the Second and Third Analogies in the following way: (1) Determining the position of an event or state of affairs in time is always determining its position relative to other events or states of affairs, and always on the presupposition that the position of the event could be determined

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far as they represent an ordered succession make the concept of a cause sensible and are for their part the condition for everything which appears to us as occurring in time. The continuity of different times which consists in the fact that time "determines the position of all its parts a priori"29* means for the appearances which can only be represented and known in accordance with it, that among them the same order prevails that exists within time itself. As far as Kant's theory of cognition is concerned: the possibility of a thing cannot be determined from the category alone. . . . So long as intuition is lacking, we do not know whether through the categories we are thinking an object, and whether indeed there can anywhere be an object suited to them.. .[For] the categories are not in themselves knowledge, but are forms of thought for the making of knowledge from given intuitions.295

relatively to all other events. (2) This thoroughgoing determinability is not possible by means of perceptions or by relating events individually to absolute time or time by itself. (3) Thus this determinability must be based on the features of the object of perception. (4) No features of objects of perception (state of affairs or events) allow us to infer their relative temporal order except in terms of rules that license such inference. Thus if X is P and Y is P1. This in itself tells us nothing of X and Y unless there is some rule that determines this order on the basis of the fact that X and Y are P and P1 respectively. (5) Thus the determinability of the relative order of events (according to the dimension-before, after, at the same time) is only possible through rules that license inferences from features of events to their temporal order. The thoroughgoing determinability of the relative order of all events require the thorough going connection of events according to such rules. (6) But a rule that allows us to infer, on the basis of certain features of events or states of affairs, that these events or states of affairs are temporally ordered in a certain way is simply the core notion of: (a) a causal law, if the inferred temporal ordering is that the event or state are successive; (b) a law of interaction if the temporal ordering inferred is that of the state are simultaneous or coexist through time (pp. 95-96). ^Critique of Pure Reason, B 245, p. 226. 'Critique of Pure Reason, B 288. See also B 294.

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In fact in order that there be real cognition "we need, not merely intuitions, but intuitions that all are in all cases outer intuition"}96 However, since through the employment of the categories, the understanding can think objects in general, we may transcend the limits of sensibility and delude ourselves into believing that cognition is possible even for pure reason alone; and this Kant holds has been the delusion of transcendental metaphysics. 297 If I take something as an objective event I take it as some thing possibly producible by an experiment. This is the specific meaning of the universal proposition that reason "has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own." 298 The elementary analysis of the object of experience shows quite generally that this object is not simple 296

Ibid., B 291, B 308.

297 In the Preface to the second edition of theCritique, Kant delivers a devastating indictment on traditional metaphysics "a battle-ground peculiarly suited to those who desire to exercise themselves in mock combats...groping among mere concepts (B XV). But "if the sure road to science" is closed to metaphysics why, he asks, should nature have visited our reason with the restless endeavor whereby it is ever searching for such a path, as if this were one of its most important concerns (B XV). In the introduction he writes...metaphysics actually exist if not as a science, yet still as a natural dispensation driven on by an inward need to questions such as cannot be answered by an empirical employment of reason or by principles thence derived (B 21). Metaphysical principles lead to the knowledge of a natural principle that is not itself a concept; transcendental principles lead to definition of a conceptual principle of possible existence. Metaphysical principles state why and how things occur; to say that bodies move because of gravity is to reach a conclusion in the realm of metaphysics. Transcendental principles state the conditions that make occurrence possible at all: the first condition for bodies to be able to change is that such a thing as bodies and motion exist or occur. The condition of existence of bodies is called substance: to state that substance is the cause of the motion of bodies is to examine critically the possibility of their existence. Metaphysical principles, on the other hand, take the existence of their object for granted as empirical fact. In describing transcendental illusion at the beginning of the Transcendental Dialectic Kant says ". .. here we have to do with a natural and inevitable illusion which rests on subjective principles, and foists them upon us as objective . . . one inseparable from human reason" (A 298/B 354, p. 300. cf A 642/ B 670, p. 531-532).

'Critique of Pure Reason, B 245, p. 226.

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but rather has to be understood as a result of a complex constitutive process. What is the exact meaning and status of event? What Kant claims to have shown is that such a concept and the principle drawn from it (that everything that happens presupposes something upon which it follows according to a rule) stand a priori before all experience and have their undoubted objective Tightness, though admittedly only in respect of experience.299 But how is such a principle to be a priori? Not by being demonstrable as an analytic or logical truth: that is a possibility Kant rules out. What we need is a transcendental proposition to show that the principle is necessarily presupposed in our experience. The Kantian procedure of thinking is not aimed at a temporally priori object or at a temporally priori knowing. The expression "before all experience" designates a quality different from the empirical, a quality that Kant defines regulatively as independence from data; it does not designate an empirical quality existing at an a priori or primal point in time. The prior is also not a matter of super-sensible entities as the metaphysical origin of the world of objects. In the transcendental method we are concerned with reflecting on the a priori that is inherent within an activity of reason. Empirical judgments about what the events are and what is the cause of their happening can be true only because there must be causes and effects among the objects of empirical knowledge in general. Thus the causal law is a transcendental proposition, because it predicates of one kind of objects, events, the condition, not contained in their concept, under which they can be objects of our knowledge. The proof of the causal law is a transcendental proof, because it contains nothing but the determination of an object in general which is to be an event in accordance with this concept. It is a peculiarity of transcendental proofs that there can be only one proof for every transcendental proposition. This follows from the fact that transcendental propositions cannot be founded on pure or empirical intuition of objects. But, if true, it must be shown to be true simply by means of concepts of objects (without being analytic). A transcendental principle, such as the causal law, is such a synthetic proposition in which a totality of subjects is represented by a concept (everything that happens) and of which something is predicated (has a Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, p. 58.

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cause). This is a universal proposition. Since the proposition is universal, the subject-concept cannot express differences between events. There is only one concept to represent them. And since the proposition is strictly universal, and permits no possible exception, it expresses, although it is synthetic, something that belongs to the essence of an event, namely, to have a cause. All this follows from the proposition being a transcendental proposition, i.e., a proposition which universally asserts something essential of its object. Or rather, as Kant puts it: "In the case of transcendental propositions . . . we always start from one concept only, and assert the synthetic condition of the possibility of the object in accordance with this concept." 300 This is Kant's definition of transcendental proposition: Synthetic propositions in regard to things in general, the intuition of which does not admit of being given a priori™ From this definition it would follow that the analogies of experience are members of the class of transcendental propositions. 302 For only the analogies are the propositions within Kant's system of propositions

Critique of Pure Reason, B 815. 301

A 720 / B 748. If we examine what it is for a certain proposition to be both synthetic and a priori we have to look at the concepts which serve as terms in their proposition. It is the "semantic" of these terms rather than the validity of the proposition in which they appear to which our attention should be drawn in the first place if we want to understand the proof of such a proposition. According to Kant's own declaration, no concepts that have anything empirical are allowed to enter into a proposition which is synthetic and a priori and has its place in transcendental philosophy (Critique of Pure Reason, B 28). The concepts which serve as terms in transcendental propositions must therefore be expected to be a priori concepts. It is a necessary condition for a concept to count as an a priori concept that its "content" does not admit of a derivation from experience, i.e., of being abstracted from specific sense-perceptions. If an a priori concept is to serve as a term in a proposition which claims to yield knowledge, it either contains, according to Kant, in itself a pure intuition or it does not. 302 Not all propositions which are qualified by Kant as synthetic and a priori and yielding knowledge need a transcendental proof (cf. Critique of Pure Reason A 782ff/B 81 Off, p. 620).

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which fulfill all the conditions for a proposition to be transcendental in that they are synthetic, a priori, claiming to yield knowledge and have categories of relation as at least one of their terms. A concept a priori which contains nothing but the synthesis of possible empirical intuitions is a category of relation. The concept of relation tests those basic rational properties of cognitional representations (either concepts or judgments) that characterize discursive thinking. Thus the category of relation indicates those relational properties of appearances that account for the different facets of temporal objectivity.303 For Kant it is experience which sets the limits for all theoretical reasoning and there is no theoretical knowledge which goes beyond the boundary of experience. Thus, Kant is firmly committed to the ideals of science and to the examination of the nature and reaches of experience.

Critique ofPure Reason, A 68/ B 93.

CONCLUSION The conclusion of the Aesthetic of the first Critique is that we cannot conceive of objects without conceiving them as spatial or temporal. In the Analytic, Kant shows that there can be no object without the activity of the understanding: Kant endeavors to show it is impossible that a concept although itself neither contained in the concept of a possible experience nor consisting of elements of a possible experience should be produced completely a priori™ He saw it as the task of transcendental methods to comprehend those fundamental facts by which a person proves himself or herself to be endowed with reason. To be conscious is to be conscious of an object. In other words, consciousness is intentional.305 But it is also to have synthesized the given representations under the concept of an object. In the very same act it is also to judge. Thus Kant insists that consciousness therefore is synthesis. He believes that if we have an intuitive representation, this does not involve consciousness until such representation is brought under the unity of a concept, i.e., of an objective judgment. Kant asks: What is assumed or presupposed whenever a content is posited as object of experience - - as object for a subject? The objection he makes to philosophers like Descartes and Berkeley is that they doubt and deny, respectively, the existence of objects in space, while continuing to affirm their own existence. The counter argument says that to know our own existence as determined in time we must know objects in space. Kant believes that Transcendental idealism implies empirical realism. If you say that all objects of experience are transcendentally ideal, you are saying that we can ^Critique ofPure Reason, A 95, p. 129. 305

This idea which is implicit in Kant's idea of self consciousness is made explicit by Husserl. [For Husserl, consciousness is intentional in the sense of being directed toward an object. Such a directedness is not necessarily a relatedness to something real (for the object of consciousness may also be a fiction). It is also intentional in the sense that every act of consciousness has its sense, which is none other than the manner in which the object is intended regardless of whether the object is real, imaginary, or fictitious.

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directly perceive both material and mental objects in our experience. This is so because both material and mental objects are just objects of possible experience. This supposedly follows from the claim that space and time are forms of our intuition and not properties of things independently of possible experience. However, Kant has shown in the Critique of Pure Reason how the most general principle of natural science can be justified starting from the very conditions for the possibility of experience. For instance, the law of causality - - everything that happens presupposes something upon which it follows according to rule306 - - follows from the principle under which the temporal order of events will be established. For that reason the causal law is a synthetic judgment a priori which can however only be proved valid for objects of experience. Here Kant asserts the possibility of experience quite independently of any particular actual experience. Thus, experience is not possible because we actually have experiences, but rather because it can be shown that the possibility of experience is necessary for reasons which are quite independent of the function of this presupposition in the proof of the causal law. Kant is concerned to explain the very possibility of any experience that yields knowledge. Kant, to some extent, regards criticism as a preliminary to the further exercise of our rational faculties in knowing what is other than themselves and this point is established by his claim that in transcendental philosophy we are not directly concerned with knowledge of objects, but rather with the relation between an idea and an object insofar as it can be thought a priori. Kant is not concerned with the faculties of the mind but with functions which must be fulfilled if experience is to be possible. There is a sense in which Kant's transcendental reflection does not serve knowledge as such but rather grasping (begreifen). What are grasped are the conditions of knowledge. These are grasped when their totality can be thought, that is to say, when a concept of the unconditioned is thought as the ground of all conditions. The significance of Kant's transcendental philosophy is two-fold. It is entirely devoid of any empirical content, whether of sensory objects or of mental faculties. Secondly, it is entirely concrete both in its intentions and its achievements. Kant is insistent that the formal aspects of experience are Critique of Pure Reason, A 189.

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useless without the content provided in sensory intuition and however far our knowledge may be extended by the use of speculative reason, we can never go beyond the limits of possible experience. Therefore, our transcendental horizon is always within the limits of possible experience. Despite the force of the ongoing attacks on the viability of transcendental philosophy, it cannot be denied that Kant developed an ingenious and entirely novel approach to the nature of knowledge. In seeking to delineate what Paton has called a "metaphysics of experience" Kant tries to define knowledge in terms of a validity furnished by a priori rules without which there could be no experience at all. Thus transcendental philosophy has the strength of directly approaching the preconditions of experience. Immanuel Kant is unquestionably the central figure in the German Enlightenment and, the so called "victory parade" which The Critique of Pure Reason celebrated throughout Germany in the 1790's with the culmination of the Enlightenment has indeed put metaphysics on the "secure path of a science." Almost every major philosophical thinking since has had to rethink the whole concept of metaphysics in the light of the Kantian categories, and the idea of human finitude which these categories attested to. Fichte (1762-1814), Schleiermacher (17681834), Schelling (1775-1834), Kierkegaard (1813-1855), all had to articulate their respective philosophical positions in light of the transcendental horizon inaugurated by the critical philosophy. If the rise of the critical philosophy met a temporary setback with the dominance of the Hegelian school in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the "back to Kant movement" inaugurated by Otto Liebmann finally established the critical philosophy as the one from which almost every other major philosophical work would have to take its departure. It is in light of this persuasiveness of the Critique that Heinrich Rickert could say that: "Kantianism is the philosophy of the totality of the world."307 The return to Kant culminated in the momentous work of Heidegger. Although Heidegger replaced Kant's conceptions of an autonomous consciousness with a world-oriented and ek-sisting 'subject' (Dasein), whose basic characteristic is the understanding of being, he Heinrich Rickert, Kant als Philosophy de modernen Kulture, Tubingen, 1924, p. 153.

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frankly admits that Kant is the philosopher who provided him with a "shelter" to help him find his way. Kant, he claimed, is one of the few thinkers who had not lost sight of the question of Being and fallen into the forgetfulness of Being characteristic of metaphysics.308 The fundamental question that Kant sets out to answer in his Critique of Pure Reason is, What is it to think at all? What operations of the understanding are required for thinking in general and how are we thinking of anything that can be thought about? I have shown that the Critique is not primarily concerned with the object of theoretical knowledge as such, but rather with the a priori principles on the one hand and the objects of knowledge on the other. The question Kant seeks to answer is: How is such a relation possible and upon what is it to be found? The philosophical investigation which tries to reveal the inner connection between the pure concepts of reason (the categories and the principles) by determining them to be related a priori to objects constitutes transcendental philosophy. Therefore, human knowledge comes about by an interaction of objective structures (the cognitive apparatus). It is in the light of this that Kant can say: All principles of the pure understanding are nothing more than principles a priori of the possibility of experience, and to experience alone do all a priori synthetic propositions relate - - indeed, their possibility itself rests entirely on this relation.309 Thus the question concerning the condition of the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori is the famous transcendental question. Kant self-consciously refers to his new approach to philosophical method as a Copernican Revolution. He draws references to the fact that just as Copernicus radically changed the human perception of the movement of heavenly bodies, he intends to reverse the traditional understanding of the knowing process by uncovering the principles that can be known a priori in the realm of knowledge. To accomplish this

Heidegger attempted to rethink Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He attempted to retrieve all the essential ideas to be maintained and to correct those ideas which he believed had become questionable or even unacceptable, and to make explicit what had to remain unsaid in Kant's own effort. Critique of Pure Reason, B 294, p. 256.

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he starts out by suggesting that whereas philosophers had always insisted that human knowledge must always conform to the objects of knowledge, we might better be able to account for what is involved in the knowing process if we begin with the premise that objects must conform to the human capacity of knowing. This move by Kant was indeed epoch-making and revolutionary. It signifies a re-orientation in man's view of himself. This new orientation in philosophical thinking gives a fresh impetus to the study of cognition and two rival schools of Kantian interpretations develop. The idea that an object must accommodate itself to knowledge led the Marburg School to conclude that the bond between knowledge and the object must likewise be established in and justified through knowledge itself. Interpreters in the Marburg School proceed in the assumption that the very process of knowledge comprises the ultimate principle presupposed by all speculation about knowledge. Contact with the object is accordingly, the immanent concern of knowledge, and it is within knowledge that it must be accounted for. The Marburg School therefore portrays Kant as the builder of the philosophy of experience, that is, the builder of the philosophy of science. On the other hand, philosophers like Heidegger (who are more oriented towards the Heidleburg School) do not consider science as a central issue; science is a secondary issue, as well as one calling for preliminary assumptions and speculation, that is, for speculation concerning man and his essence. Experience grasped in its totality is, but the real encounter of real man with the real world. Thus Heidegger poses the question concerning synthetic judgments a priori in the realm of the metaphysics of man. This positive transfer of Kant's philosophy extricates the critical philosophy from its engagement in science. Philosophy does not propose to be a scientific philosophy by being a philosophy of science. It aims at being a radical philosophy by being a fundamental ontology, that is to say a metaphysics of man. The three controlling categories of Heidegger's interpretation of the critical philosophy are transcendence, finitude, and ontology. Whereas for Kant, the a priori consists of everything which in our knowledge is independent of experience, for Heidegger the term refers to our preontological understanding of Being which is operative in every attempt on the part of Dasein to understand a being as such.

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Although this pre-ontological understanding of Being is in time simultaneously with Dasein's understanding of the relevant being or beings, the pre-ontological understanding of Being is prior because Dasein understands a being as being by projecting it upon the horizon of Being which functions as the synthesis a priori. The question concerning the meaning of Being is oriented by Heidegger from the very beginning toward that which, as the synthesis a priori, conditions all knowledge of whatever there is. Contrary to Heidegger's novel interpretation, Kant introduces us to his theoretical philosophy by stating that both mathematics and physics rest on synthetic judgments a priori.310 The Critique in fundamental manner inquires into the ground of the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori. It is a treatise on method, not a system of the science itself. However, Kant believes that geometry contains some synthetic a priori propositions about space and tries to show that this can be explained if space is the "form of outer sense." Geometric propositions cannot constitute an analysis of our concept of space, for they would be analytic a priori. By a process of elimination, they must therefore be explained not by our concepts but by our intuitions, that is to say, by our acquaintance with particulars. But empirical intuitions would not be able to explain how any propositions could be a priori. So only an a priori intuition can explain the possibility of geometry. But the only a priori acquaintance with particulars that we have is our knowledge of space and time. For these are not given to us, but are the forms under which we perceive all other particulars. Because Kant thinks that a priori knowledge is possible only when our knowledge determines its object rather than the other way around. ™ Critique of Pure Reason, A 713 / B 741, B 40-1. In a note, Kant comments that the method he uses in demonstrating the truth of his Copernican hypothesis resembles the method of chemists who, by extracting certain portions form a compound and recombining them, determine the compound's nature and necessary constituents (B xxn). This is a clear attempt to arouse the belief that the problems of confirmation confronted and the methods used by metaphysicians are very similar to the natural scientists. But the analogy remains incomplete because natural scientists are able to effect a separation of elements that the metaphysician is not. The metaphysician is constrained to adopt an indirect method of proof for his conception of the origin and scope of pure concepts.

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Conclusion

An a priori intuition must be an intuition that we contribute. All our knowledge with objects presupposes time and all our knowledge with "outer" objects presupposes space. Therefore, space and time can be understood respectively as the forms of "inner" and "outer" sense. Although space and time are not derived from experience, objects must fall under concepts of space and time because they are pure forms of our sensible intuition. Any perception we have of objects around us must be spatial and temporal. Man is therefore limited to the spatial and temporal order and what is even more important, space and time are not properties of the objective world but of the human person. Space and time are therefore transcendentally ideal and empirically real because they function as a priori conditions of human sensibility. Transcendental idealism is therefore an attempt to state the limits of human knowledge. We may know things only in so far as we can intuit them. However intuition is subject to the spatial and temporal order. Human knowledge is limited to space and time. Kant believes that all our representations must be in space or time and we are a priori certain of the unity of space and time. Kant further argues that since all unity (the unity of space and time included) presupposes a synthesis which does not belong to the senses311 but to the understanding and its categories, everything that is to be represented as determined in space or in time must conform to the categories. Kant argues that not only the unity of consciousness but also the universality and the unity of space and time are necessary to guarantee the universal validity of the categories.312 Thus we can know objects which correspond to the representation given to us through space and time and the objectivity of these objects is possible only by the categories. Numerous philosophers have interpreted Kant's transcendental philosophy in different ways. Some have suggested that for Kant reality is supersensible and unknowable, and all that is available to human consciousness is mere appearance. Others have argued that Kant postulated two distinct realms or entities, the realm of things in themselves and that of appearances. Thus the proponents of the two

311

Critique of Pure Reason, B 160, note.

312

'Critique of Pure Reason, B 161.

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world theory argue that there is a fundamental dichotomy or contradiction in Kant's transcendental philosophy. However, I have shown that there is no contradiction in Kant's transcendental philosophy. On the contrary I am convinced that the philosophical method introduced by Kant is the one that does the greatest justice to what is involved in the knowing process. It is generally agreed that we do not have one to one correspondence with the object of experience. Knowledge of object is always mediated. There are certain constraints placed on human reason based on the fact of human finitude. Human beings are limited to space and time. The only way that an object can be given is through space and time. For space and time are not the properties of things given in sensory experience but are the forms under which we perceive all objects of experience. Whatever ability there is for the human person to comprehend any object of possible experience has to be within the a priori forms of space and time. Thus space and time are empirically real and transcendentally ideal. There is an empirical side and a transcendental side to human consciousness. To know our own existence as determined in time we must know objects in space. What is more, whatsoever appears on the horizon of human consciousness (both the mental and the physical) are phenomena for transcendental philosophical reflection. In transcendental philosophy we are dealing with both the empirical subject as experiencing and the empirical subject as experience and both form a unity. Thus transcendental reflection reveals that there is a unity to human experience. The distinction between the subject and the object takes place in the activity of reason exercising its transcendental function. I believe that Kant's transcendental philosophy is fully concrete to the extent that he has clearly demonstrated that inner experience is possible only on the assumption of outer experience.

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Index

aposteriori 4, 6, 42, 44, 54, 108 apriori 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 74, 79, 80, 81,83,84,85,86,87,88,95,96, 97,98,99, 100, 101, 109, 110, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127 abbreviated 75 Absolute 13, 42, 43, 56, 87, 115 abstruse 92 accomplishment.. 12, 107 achievement 16,49,71 Aesthetic 1,19, 49, 73, 84, 86,96, 104, 120 aggregation 102 agnostic 27 Allison 16, 28, 41, 73, 74, 75 alternation 106 alternative 14, 16, 26, 88 analysis 4, 9, 14, 27, 31, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 54, 62, 67, 68, 76, 80, 82, 84, 85, 88, 95, 102, 103, 116, 125 analytic 1, 4, 19, 24, 29, 37, 41,44,45,46,47,48,49,51,70, 79,80,83,87,89,91,99,101, 107, 111, 112, 117, 125 appearance 13, 17, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 50, 55, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 97, 107, 110, 113, 126 apperception 34, 35, 68, 85, 86, 87,89,90,91,92

155

application 1, 6, 19, 35, 58, 87, 88,91, ...102 apprehension 84, 92, 106, 107, 113 Aquila 28 architectonic 39 arithmetic 34, 88 Arthur Melnick... 26 assumption 1, 12, 30, 31, 32, 44, 53, 60, 70, 88, 106, 124, 127 astronomy 13, 15

B Beck 69,72,79,84, Bennett 83,89 Berkeley 73, 120 Bertrand biology Bird

8, 16, 27, 46, 47, 111 27, 29, 31, 80, 81, 57, 60, 65, 71, 72, 14,53 9,10,64 24,25

Caird 48 Cartesian 22,52,93,94 Cassirer 20,22 Castaneda 44 categories 4, 7, 10, 16, 19, 23, 24,29,31,32,33,35,38,58,63, 66,68,69,72,77,78,79,80,81, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 102, 107, 115, 116, 119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127 causal law 15,99, 111, 115, 117, 121 causality 3, 8, 30, 49, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 113, 121 chemistry 64

156 Chisholm, Roderick M. 91 cognition 5, 7, 10, 14, 28, 31, 38,42,63,65,67,68,76,77,91, 100, 101,102, 109, 115,116, 124 comprehend 20, 120, 127 comprehension... 22,101 conceive 25, 32, 77, 78, 113, 120 concept 5,6,7,8, 15, 19, 25,26,32,34,35,41,44,45,46, 47, 48, 51, 53, 55, 65, 68, 70, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 85, 87, 91, 92, 95, 96, 98, 100, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125 conception 3, 10, 13, 22, 26, 52, 56, 68, 76, 80, 125 conceptual 15, 32, 44, 45, 46, 52,69,75,91, 110, 113, 116 conceptualization 30,92 conscious 17, 24, 29, 31, 32, 45,69,81,86,91, 103, 104,120 consistency 55 constitute 13, 18, 24, 30, 57, 63, 84, 97, 125 constitution 42, 50, 54, 62, 65, 66, 74, 76 construction 17, 34, 47, 48, 108 constructive 47, 48 contemporaneous 83 contemporaries... 70 Contemporary.... 49, 91 content 8, 14, 30, 31, 36, 48, 52, 57, 58, 60, 68, 72, 79, 80, 90,97,98, 102, 104, 118, 120, 121 contingent 43, 44, 52, 94 controversies 20, 23 controversy 4, 22, 23, 24, 33 Copernican 1, 2, 3, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15,16, 17, 19,20,33,40,74, 87,94,95, 123, 125 Copernicus 1, 4, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 123 correlation 31

Index cosmology 37 criterion 42, 43, 44, 46, 60, 113, 114 critical 3,5,9, 19,20,21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 33, 39, 40, 46, 48, 49,55,61,69,88,93,101, 112, 122, 124 Critique 1,2,6,9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19,20,22,23,24, 29,30,31,33,34,36,37,38,39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 47, 49, 53, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 70, 73,74,75,76,79,80,81,82,84, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101,103, 105, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126

D Dasein 23,31,122, 124 definitive 9,92,100 demonstrable 15,117 Descartes 22, 44, 60, 65, 82, 86, 103, 120 determination 14, 24, 31, 37, 43, 58,60,69,77,85, 104, 113, 117 dimensional 54 Ding an Sich 75 discursive 14,90,119 Dissertation 56, 74 distinction 6, 24, 25, 28, 38, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 52, 55, 64, 66, 67, 70, 72, 75, 76, 90, 95, 101, 127 doctrines 1, 13, 15, 45, 49 dogmas 15 dogmatic 8, 9, 15, 16, 24, 111, 112

Index

element 3, 5, 17, 19, 48, 52, 71,84 empirical 3, 6, 8, 12, 18, 19, 24,25,30,31,33,36,38,39,45, 47, 50, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76,77,78,79,81,83,85,86,87, 88,94,95,96,99, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 113, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125, 127 Enlightenment.... 20, 23, 122 episode 92 epistemic 4, 12, 14, 25, 26, 30, 74, 92 epistemology 1, 9, 10, 20, 22, 24, 39, 56, 87, 95 epitomized 41 Euclid 53 Ewing,A.C 14,20,111 existence 3, 5, 6, 10, 15, 49, 60, 61, 62, 72, 73, 74, 81, 88, 92, 103, 108, 109, 116, 120, 127 experience 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 16, 17, 19,22,23,24,25,26, 27,29,30,31,32,33,35,36,37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69, 71,74,75,77,78,79,80,81,82, 83,84,86,87,88,89,90,91,92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127 experiential 19 explicate 4,79,80

157

faculties 17, 80, 84, 89, 91, 121 faculty 3, 14, 16, 65, 79, 85,87,95, 101, 107 Fichte, J. Gottlieb 9, 101, 122 Findlay 25,26,29,77 Fisher 70 foundationalist.... 93 framework 5, 28, 30, 52, 69, 71,75,95, 100 Freedom 23, 28 fundamental 13, 22, 28, 31, 33, 36, 37, 39, 44, 45, 55, 56, 57, 60, 65,86,87,93,95, 100, 110, 120, 123, 124, 125, 126

Galileo generalization genesis geocentricism geometry God

2 54 100 15 33, 34, 48, 53, 88, 125 23,45,74

H Heidegger 4, 9, 21, 22, 24, 30, 37, 38, 122, 123, 124, 125 Heidelberg 20, 21, 22, 30, 32, 70 Henrich 30, 32 Hintikka 48, 53, 69 homogeneous 58 horizon 50,57, 122,124, 127 Hume, David 8, 46, 65, 82, 92, 103, 107, 108,109, 111, 112 hyphenated 76 hypostatize 76

Index

158 hypostatizing hypothesis 61, 125 hypothetically

25 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,

investigation, 18, 57, 67, 123 irreversibility24, 111, 113

13

JonnFindlay idealism 11, 29, 30, 55, 57, 60, 61, 62, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 80, 120, 126 idealist 56, 57, 71 identification 52, 94 illusion 57,73, 116 imagination 35, 38, 47, 97, 102, 104 immediacy 53 Immortality 23 implausible 13 incomprehensible 27, 114 inconsistent 25 independent 3, 8, 13, 27, 32, 41, 51,62,64,66,71,73,77,94,95, 100, 121, 124 induction 12,13,15,16 inner sense 57,85,102,104 innovation 12,15,16 insight 2, 16, 17, 33, 40, 45,52,63,65,101,103,116 intelligence 94 intelligible 19, 28, 49, 69, 103 interaction 8,61, 115, 123 interpretation 16, 21, 24, 28, 31, 37, 53, 62, 63, 66, 70, 73, 75, 76, 77, 82, 93, 124, 125 interpreters 4, 20, 31, 73, 80 intersubjectively.. 91 introspection 64 intuition 5, 7, 10, 14, 16, 26, 27, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 45, 46, 47,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 76,79,85,94,95,96,101,102, 104, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 122, 125, 126

25, 29, 77

K Kalin ....69 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, Kant 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19,20, 21,22,23,24 , 25, 26, 27,, 28, 29, 30,31,32,33 , 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 , 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48,49,50,51 , 52, 53, 54 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61 , 62, 63, 64 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70 ,71,72,73. 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80,81,82,83 , 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89 90,91,92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 01, 102, 103, 104, 105 , 106, 108 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 114, 115 116, 117, 118, 119, 120. 121, 122 123, 124, 125, 126, 127 14, 20, 69, 89 Kant Studien 10, 15, 16, 19,20, Kantian 21,22,23,24 25,42,51,53,56, 62,65,67,71 , 73, 74, 76, 77, 84, 95, 100, 101, 102, 110, 117, 122, 124 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, knowledge 9, 10, 12, 13 14,15,16,17,19,21, 22, 23, 24, 25,26,27,29,30,31, 32, 33, 34, 35. 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44. 45, 46, 47, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56. 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 68, 69, 70f 72, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85 86,87,89,90,91, 92, 93, 94, 95: 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105 , 107,109,111,115,

Index 116, 117, 118, 119,121,122, 123, 124, 125, 126

legitimate legitimization Lehrer, Keith Leibniz limitation Loemaker Lorenz Lovejoy, Arthur

19, 24, 63, 99 44, 92 91 41, 44, 47, 56, 74 19, 26, 51 44 10, 61 I l l , 112

159

N nature 2, 3, 10, 12, 13, 20, 22, 23, 32, 33, 37, 43, 53, 61, 68, 73, 74, 75, 76, 89, 92, 95, 97, 99, 100, 103, 108, 109, 116, 119, 122, 125 necessity 3, 5, 8, 33, 42, 43, 44,45,46,51,69,81,86,87, 103, 105,106, 113 nonsequitur 111,112,113 notion 19, 24, 25, 26, 27, 45, 49, 53, 65, 74, 79, 88, 99, 102, 108, 113, 115 noumena 28

M manifestation 55,64 Marburg 20,22,124 mathematics 4, 34, 39, 40, 42, 44,46,47,48,53,82, 125 Meerbote 27,28 Melnick, Arthur.. 26, 27, 114 metaphysic 39, 116 metaphysical 9, 15, 17, 23, 24, 49,69,75,96, 101, 117 metaphysics 12, 13, 15,17, 22, 23,24,31,38,39,40,44,47,49, 74,76,80,92,93,95, 111,116, 122, 123, 124 method 2,4, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 24, 33, 36, 47, 48, 82, 98, 100, 117, 123, 125, 126 mind 5, 7, 13, 16, 22, 42, 44,46,50,51,54,62,63,65,69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 80, 84, 85, 87, 90, 92,94,97,99, 109, 121 Moltke21,72, 111 mysteries 33 mysterious 72

o object 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 14,17,21,22,25,26,27,28,30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 40, 46, 47, 48, 50,51,53,54,56,61,63,64,66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 80, 81,85,86,87,89,90,91,92,93, 94,95,96,98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 110, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127 objective validity 5, 6, 24, 33, 35, 46, 80,81,83,89,95,96,99, 108,114 objectivity 7, 17, 24, 30, 31, 77, 81, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 96, 97, 107, 111, 119, 126 observation 15, 54, 55, 68, 103, 111 ontic 24,37 ontology 4, 22, 23, 31, 37, 38,39, 112, 124 origin 24, 83, 86, 87, 88, 96, 108, 117 orthodox 82 outer intuition 54,104,116

160

paradigm 32, 33, 39, 65 paradoxical 88 Parson 53 Paton, H. J 14, 20, 23, 71, 82, 122 permanence 30 phenomena 6, 28, 56, 61, 63, 64,68, 107, 127 phenomenology.. 23 philosophy 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19,20,21,22,23,24,25, 26,28,29,31,33,36,37,38,39, 40,41,42,44,45,48,49,51,53, 56, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 89,92,93,99, 101, 112, 118, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127 physical 6,30,37,49,63, 64,69,71, 127 physics 4, 33, 42, 44, 82, 125 polemic 20, 24 possibility 1, 9, 16, 17, 23, 30, 32,33,35,36,38,40,44,49,51, 53,65,74,79,80,81,83,84,88, 89,91,96,98,99, 104, 107, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 123, 125 possiblity 16, 17, 23, 30, 32, 33,35,36,38,39,40,44,49,51, 53, 65, 74, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 88, 89, 91, 96, 98 Prauss 28, 63, 75, 76, 77 precedents 15 predecessors 16, 41, 52, 65, 95 presupposition.... 12, 17, 31, 107, 114, 121 pretence 39 pretensions 12 Prichard, H. A Ill principle 3, 8, 14, 17, 19, 22, 31,32,34,35,39,43,44,45,46, 55, 57, 65, 69, 76, 79, 85, 88, 89, 92, 100,105, 106, 107,110,111, 112, 113, 114,116, 117,121,124

Index projection 12, 16, 66, 108 Prolegomena 8, 16, 34, 56, 57, 75,79,84, 114, 117 properties 48, 50, 54, 58, 63, 83, 119,121, 126,127 proposition 8, 17, 43, 44, 45, 48,54,93, 108, 116, 117, 118, 119 Ptolemaic 14, 15

R rational 19, 23, 36, 43, 90, 93,94, 100, 101, 111, 119, 121 realist 56, 57 reality 4, 6, 13, 23, 24, 30, 31,35,38,50,52,55,63,65,66, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 90, 94, 95, 96, 104, 113, 126 Reason 1, 2,6,9, 11, 12, 13, 14,15,16, 17,19,20,22,23,24, 29,31,33,34,36,37,38,39,41, 42, 45, 47, 49, 53, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 70, 73, 76, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 105, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126 Refutation 60,73 representation 3, 4, 7, 47, 50, 53, 55, 57, 58, 68, 85, 86, 93, 102, 104, 120, 126 Revolution 1, 2, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19,20, 33,39, 74, 87, 97,.123 Rorty, Richard.... 29, 53, 69, 89 rules 7, 13, 17,25,32, 35,79,97,98, 100,106,107,115, 117, 122

saltus schemata

98 58, 99, 102

Index schematism 101, 102 science 2, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 22,23,24,31,33,39,42,68,77, 88,93, 100, 101, 116, 119, 121, 122, 124, 125 scientific 3, 6, 9, 10, 12, 15, 22, 29, 40, 57, 67, 124 scientist 13 selfhood 93, 94 sensibility 6, 7, 26, 38, 50, 51, 54, 55, 56, 58, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68, 74,76,80,86,95, 101, 104, 110, 116, 126 sensible 7, 14, 26, 49, 50, 51,56,58,60,66,67,68,71,83, 96, 101,102, 110, 115,117, 126 sensory 4, 33, 35, 36, 58, 62,76, 108, 109, 121, 127 sensuous 25 Smith 2, 14,20,21,48, 49, 82, 111 space 5, 6, 7, 13, 30, 48, 49,50,51,52,54,55,56,57,60, 61,67,72,73,86,96, 103, 104, 105, 120, 125, 126, 127 spatio-temporal... 27, 30, 49, 52, 56, 70,71,72,95 Stahl 2 Stenius 48 strategy 81 Strawson 28, 29, 30, 31, 52, 53,70,71,72,80,81,82,83,89, 95, 111, 112, 113 Stroud 29, 69 structure 8, 9, 16, 20, 22, 24, 26, 39, 42, 49, 52, 63, 65, 80, 82, 84, 85, 91, 98 sub specie aeternitatis 75 subjective deduction 82 substitution 4, 15 subsumable 27, 109 subversion 15 supersensible 70, 72, 126

161 Swartz, Robert J.. 91 synthesis 6, 7, 30, 35, 42, 77, 79, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 102, 103, 106, 107, 109, 119, 120, 125, 126 synthetic 3, 4, 8, 9, 15, 16, 18,22,23,34,35,38,39,40,41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 79, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 97, 99, 112, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 124, 125 synthetic propositions 44, 46, 48, 96 syntheticity 17

T temporal 8, 24, 27, 29, 49, 50, 52, 56, 60, 70, 71, 72, 74, 95, 102, 104, 115, 119, 120, 121, 126 theorem 79 theoretical 1, 4, 19, 26, 32, 36, 38,42,84, 101, 119, 123, 125 things-in-themselves 28,67 thinkables 26 time 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 13,24, 26, 30, 34, 42, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51,52,54,55,57,58,60,61,67, 68, 72, 73, 80, 86, 91, 92, 96, 98, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 110, 113, 114, 117, 120,124, 125,126,127 Torricelli 2 Transcendental... 1, 16, 17, 19, 22, 24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32, 35,36,37,38,40,49,50,51,55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76,77,78,79,80,81,83,84,85, 86,87,88,89,91,92,93,96,98, 99, 101, 104, 116, 120, 126 Transcendental Aesthetic 19

162

Index

transcendental argument 16,79 transcendental proof 17, 103,117, 118 treatise 22, 125

universal, 7, 8, 23, 32, 34, 47, 58, 77, 86,87,90, 103, 106, 108, 110, 112, 116, 118, 126 universality 5, 8, 42, 43, 44, 87, 126 unknowability 25, 69, 105

u

V

ultimate 16, 17, 60, 84, 97, 124 understanding..4, 7, 10, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20, 22, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 56, 58, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 70, 79, 84, 85, 87, 89, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 107, 116, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126

verification

26, 69

w Wittgenstein, L 9, 89 Wolff, Christian21, 25, 29, 46, 47, 80, 81,82,83,111, 112