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are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the
omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported
between brackets in normal-sized type.Kant wrote this to meet a requirement of his promotion to the rank of
Professor. In it he was working his way close to positions he would later be offering in the Critique of Pure Reason.
In trying to bring the work more within reach of students than do the previous translations, good as those are,
the present version takes some unusual liberties in its translations; some are confessed in the Glossary.The
bold-type subsection numbers are Kants.
First launched: May 2012
Contents
Section I: The notion of a world in general (12)
Section II: The distinction between sensibles and intelligibles in general (312)
Section III: The principles of the form of the sensible world (1315)
10
Section IV: The principle of the form of the intelligible world (1622)
16
Section V: The method of dealing with the sensitive and the intellectual in metaphysics (2330)
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Glossary
accident: Often used to mean non-essential property: your
being more than 5 tall is an accident of you, whereas
some philosophers would say that your having the power
of thought is not. Kant uses the Latin accidens here just
to mean property or quality, with no evident emphasis on
non-essentialness.
affections: Properties, qualities.
allness: This translates Kants totalitas. We do have totality,
but it too easily reads as concrete rather than abstractHe
has moved the totality of his books to his beach cottage. If
you go to http://sentence.yourdictionary.com/totality youll
see twenty examples, all concrete rather than abstract. In
the sub-heading on page 4, allness translates Universitas,
which occurs only that once in this work.
fit: As used in 30 this translates convenientia = going
together or having the same intellectual shape.
how-manyness: How many cubic yard of space are there?
Kant distinguishes two replies that might be made:
(1) There are infinitely many of them, and
(2) Theres an infinite number of them,
Kant holds that (1) is true while (2) is impossible because
infinite number is self-contradictory. (It isnt, but the
mathematical work that put infinite number on a good
footing wasnt done until about a century later.) So Kant
needs a notion of how-manyness that is broader than that of
number; he expresses this by multitudo in Latin and Menge
in German.
implanted: Kant speaks (four times) of laws that are insitus
in the mind. This literally means laws that are grafted onto
Immanuel Kant
rational: This means based entirely on a priori considerations, with no trace of anything empirical. When Kant calls
a kind of psychology rational, he isnt praising it.
simple: Having no parts = not being a composite.
switching: This translates Kants subreptio which strictly
means secretely filching. But subreption and subreptive
are intolerable; and what is in question here is a propositions secretely filching a status that it isnt entitled to,
passing itself off as something that it isnt. So switch seems
about right. Several of Kants turns of phrase around this
topic suggest that he is thinking in terms of things like a
shop-keeper passing off glass-chips as diamonds.
sympathetic: Kants sympatheticum comes from sympathia
= sympathy. This, and its descendants in other languages,
had two related senses. (a) Fellow-feeling, as when your
sadness saddens me or your happiness makes me happpy.
(b) Echoing or matching of changes in one thing by changes
in another, e.g. when a chord played on your violin makes the
strings of mine tremble a little. Kant in 22 calls a matching
of states sympathetic as a way of saying that it is not causal
but is a mere correlation.
Immanuel Kant
principles come in (especially in Sections III and IV, including their titles) as the sources not of worlds but of the forms. Still,
sentences in bold type on pages 3 and 16 suggest that Kant thought that something could be the source of a world by being the
source of its form.]
Immanuel Kant
Those who reject the actual mathematical infinite find that the rejection comes easily! (a) Some of them define infinite in such a way that it does
rather easily yield contradictions. According to them:
an infinite quantum is one such that its impossible for any to be larger, and
the mathematical infinite is a how-manyness [see Glossary] than which a greater is impossible.
But these define maximum or greatest, not infinite; and a greatest how-manyness is indeed impossible; and thats how these people infer the
impossibility of this infinite that they have invented! (b) Others speak of an infinite how-manyness as an infinite number, and show that this is
absurd, as it clearly is. But this is also fighting only with figments of the mind. If they had conceived the mathematical infinite [infinitum ] as a
how-many that is greater than any number; and if they had seen that any definite [definitum ] concept of a how-many can be attained only by
successively adding unit to unit and bringing this process to an end in a finite [finito ] time; then they would have seen that things that dont square
with a certain law of human knowledge might be known by some non-human intellect that could see some how-manyness at a glance, with no need
count it.
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the same world, and must therefore keep the same basic
essential form. (Dont think it could remain the same just
by the continuing existence of its parts; its identity requires
that it keep the same characteristic composition.) Also (ii) if
a worlds essence could change, that would mean that the
basic internal principle of all the changes that occur in it
would be opposed to itself, which is impossible. . . . [Point (ii)
Immanuel Kant
Section II: The distinction between sensible things and intelligible things in general
3. Your sensibility is your receptivity, your ability to be
on the receiving end, through which your mind can be
How an object affects your senses doesnt put into your sensory state
so, for the various effects that the object has on your senses
to coalesce into a single over-all representation your mind
has to have a built-in principle [see Glossary] which, operating
by strict innate laws, pulls these items together into a
structured whole.
5. In sensory knowledge, then, we have matter (i.e. sensation) and form. Its because of the element of sensation
that such knowledge counts as sensory [sensuales]; and
its because of the form that the representations in such
knowledge count as sensitive [sensitivae], and would do so
even if no sensation were involved.
Intellectual knowledge involves the minds higher faculty
the intellectand its important to understand that this has
two uses. (a) In the real use of the intellect, the concepts
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getting its input from a pure intuition.] [That last phrase, which
will loom large in the Critique, makes its first (unexplained) appearance
here. It will turn up again in items 12, 15 and 25. Incidentally, in
this context principle doesnt have the older meaning explained in the
Glossary.]
On the sensory or phenomenal side, theres a distinction to be made: sensory content that hasnt yet been
processed by the logical use of the intellect is called appearance; and the reflexive knowledge that comes from the
intellects relating several appearances to one another is
called experience. So the only route from appearance to
experience runs through reflection involving the logical use
of the intellect. The common concepts of experience are
called empirical, and the objects of experience are called
phenomena; the laws of experience and quite generally of
all sensitive knowledge are called laws of phenomena. Note
well: quite generally, of all. . . : Empirical concepts dont
become intellectual by being used at ever higher levels of
generality. For an empirical concept there is no escape from
the domain of sensitive knowledge; it will always remain
sensitive, however abstractly it is used.
6.
Immanuel Kant
do this: abstracting occurs just this once. Nor does he again (in this
work) follow his other remark that it is more advisable to call intellectual
concepts pure ideas.]
7.
This shows us that its wrong to trace the sensitive/intellectual line back to the confused/distinct line. The
latter distinction is a logical one that has nothing to do
with the data the intellect works on in drawing things
into structures. The two lines cut across one another:
something can be sensitive and very distinct, like geometry,
the prime example of sensitive knowledge; or intellectual
and extremely confused, like metaphysics, the organon [see
Glossary] of everything. Everyone knows how much effort
metaphysics puts into dispelling the clouds of confusion
that darken the common intellect, though it often has a
less happy outcome than geometry does. But each of these
bears the marks of its origin: the origin of the first kind
qualifies it to count as sensitive, however distinct a given
case of it may be; and the origin of the second kind qualifies
it as intellectual, even if it is confused. As an example
of something that is intellectual and confused, I offer you
moral concepts which we all know are confused and which
are known not by experience but through the pure [see
Glossary] intellect itself. The illustrious Christian Wolff took
the sensitive/intellectual distinction to be a merely logical
one; this destroyed the noblest enterprise of antiquity, the
inquiry into the nature of phenomena and noumena, and
did great harm to philosophy by turning mens minds away
from that towards details in logic, often very minor ones.
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view (perhaps not fully formed at the time this dissertation was written)
that the sensitive/intellectual line coincides with the passive/active
line, and that this is more than a mere coincidence.]
11.
[Kant adds and this is opposed to idealism; this is the only mention
of idealism in this dissertation.] (b) Think about judgements
Theoretical: concerned with how things are. Practical: concerned with how they ought to be.
Immanuel Kant
[What is at work here is Kants three-part thesis that (a) all our intuitions
have imposed on them a certain form; (b) this form has to do with
spatiality (for our outer intuitions) and temporality (for all our intuitions,
inner and outer); and (c) we have to think of these not in terms of
the general concepts of spatiality and temporality but in terms of two
individuals, Space and Time. When we say that all physical objects are
spatial, what we do or should mean is not that they fall under the general
concept of spatiality, but rather that they are all in Space, in that one
great big thing.]
In addition to phenomena
tive/intellectual line;
and they can satisfy both (i) and (ii) because they
(iii) present us with the form (but not the content) of
sensibility.
They satisfy (i) because they present only form, not content;
they satisfy (ii) because what they present the form of is
sensibility. And I express all this by saying that they
(iv) present us with intuitions that are pure, i.e. empty of
sensations.
The phenomena of outer sense are displayed and examined in
physics, and those of inner sense in empirical psychology.
But pure intuition (our pure intuition) is not
a universal or logical concept under which things are
thought, but
a singular concept in which sensible things are
thought,
and so it contains the concepts of space and time.
the sun;
with space: counting the planets.
Thus, pure mathematics deals with the form of all our sensitive knowledge, which makes it the organon [see Glossary] of all
knowledge that is both intuitive and clear. And because its
objectsspace and timeare not only the formal principles
of every intuition but are themselves original intuitions, it
provides us with entirely genuine knowledge while also giving
us a model of the highest kind of certainty in other fields. So
there is a science of sensible thingsmeaning science in
its stiffest and most demanding sensealthough intellect
comes into it only in a logical role, not in a real role of
adding to the content of the science [see page 5]. . . .
Immanuel Kant
14. Time
(1) The idea of time doesnt come from the senses but is
presupposed by them: its only through the idea of time that
means in this work. Latin does not distinguish the principle and the
form from a principle and a form. This paragraph offers no basis for
a consistent choice, and the present version will push along as best it
why theres a threat of vicious circle here. His remark about a singular
intuition is also pretty brief; but it is expounded more fully in section 4
Alsoreturning now
to the main thesis of this paragraphwe conceive of all
actual things as situated in time and not as contained under
its general notion as though being-in-time was a general
characteristic that they all share.
(iii) So the idea of time is an intuition. The conception
of it comes before every sensation, as a pre-requirement for
the relations that hold among sensible things; from which it
of www.earlymoderntexts.com/jfb/time.pdf.]
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[Kant now has a paragraph reporting a thoughtexperiment by which the celebrated Kaestner explored
Leibnizs thesis that all change is continuous. It has to
do with the movement of a point through an angle, and
concludes that if all change is continuous then a body can
change direction only in a curve. The argument turns on
how the last instant when the point is moving into the angle
relates to the first instant when it is moving out of the angle;
but if time is continuous there are no such two instants, and
the argument collapses.]
(v) Time is not something objective and real, not a substance or accident [see Glossary] or relation; rather, it is a
condition that has to be satisfied if sensible things are to
be inter-related by fixed laws. Its the nature of the human
mind that sets this condition, so it is subjective. It is a pure
intuition. [This indented passage is an addition to what Kant wrote.]
Its an intuition because it is tied in with sensibility;
it is something we confront in our experience, not
something abstract and intellectual. And it is pure
because it doesnt have any empirical content; it is the
required background against which, or frame within
which, empirical content reaches us.
Its only through the concept of time that we co-ordinate substances and accidents as being simultaneous or successive;
and so the notion of time, as being what gives form to our
sensory intake, is prior to the concepts of substance and
accident. . . .
Those who assert the objective reality of time go in one
of two ways. (a) English philosophers, especially, think of
time as some continuous flux that exists but doesnt involve
any other real thingsa preposterous view! (b) Leibniz and
his followers think of time as something real, abstracted
from the succession of internal states. The falsity of this
can be seen in the vicious circle in the definition of time
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15. Space
(A) The concept of space is not abstracted from external sensations. I cant conceive of something x as located outside
Two items arent made to be simultaneous just by not being successive. Take away successiveness and you do indeed abolish a relation that existed
because of the series of time, but that doesnt automatically create another true relationship, like simultaneity. Simultaneous things are connected
at the same instant just as successive things are connected across different instants. Time has only one dimension only; but what Newton called
its ubiquity [see Glossary]. . . .adds a further dimension to the quantity of actual things which hang, as it were, upon the same point of time. If you
represent time by a straight line produced to infinity, and represent simultaneous things at any temporal point by lines joining at right angles, the
surface which is thus generated will represent the phenomenal world, both as to its substances and as to its accidents.
12
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(D) Space is not something objective and realnot a substance or accident or relationbut is subjective and ideal:
Its easy to prove that space must be conceived of as a continuous quantity, and I shant go into that here. Because it is continuous, any portion of
space must be composed of smaller portions, and therefore cant be simple in the sense of not having parts; from which it follows that the only simple
items in space are not portions of space but limits. . . . A space that isnt the limit of another space is complete, i.e. is solid = three-dimensional.
The limit of a solid is a surface, the limit of a surface is a line, the limit of a line is a point. So there are three sorts of limits in space, just as there
are three dimensions. Two of these limits (surface and line) are themselves spaces. Space and time are the only quantas to which the concept of a
limit applies.
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Corollary
These, then, are the two principles of sensitive knowledge;
they arent general concepts such as come into play in
intellectual matters, but singular intuitions whose status
as intuitions doesnt stop them from being pure. The laws
of reason in intellectual matters teach that what makes a
composite thing possible are its parts, especially its simple
parts; but when we move across from intellectual matters
to sensitive intuition, the story changes: it is the infinite
whole that makes possible each thinkable part, right down
to the simple ones (which arent parts but limits). To mark
off any definite space or time by assigning its limits you
have to start with infinite space and infinite time within
which the smaller spaces or times are marked off. And the
markersthe point and the instantare conceivable only as
limits within a space and time that is already given. So all
the basic properties of these concepts lie outside the domain
of reason and therefore cant be explained in intellectual
terms. Still, they are what the intellect works with when with
perfect confidence it uses logical laws to draw conclusions
from primary data of intuition.
15
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Thus the question about the principle of the form of the intelligible world requires us to make clear what enables many
substances to interact in such a way as to belong to a single
whole that is called a world. [The note at the top of page 1 explains
Immanuel Kant
the interaction of substances (i.e. the two-way dependence of their states) doesnt follow from their mere
existence,
this Section Kant will flesh out that last sentence: the cause of the world
isnt in the world by being somewhere in it or everywhere in it, but by
being inwardly present to things, thus making it possible for them to be
spatially related to one another.]
20. Substances that are in the world derive from something other than themselves; but not from several such
somethingsthey all derive from one entity. If they were
caused by several necessary beings, they couldnt interact
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(i) implies (ii), there are plenty of reasons to favour the first
[The rest of this paragraph re-arranges what Kant wrote in ways that
cant easily by indicated by dots, brackets, etc., but it doesnt change the
Unchangeable?
Dont we experience the flow of time? No! We dont experience moments of time succeeding one another, because that would
require a second time in which this succession occurred. The appearance that sensitive intuition presents us with is of events flowing towards us
down the continuous and unchanging channel, so to speak, of moments.
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rather than setting sail into the deep sea of mystical inquiries,
as Malebranche did. I mention him because his view that
we see all things in God is close to the opinions I have
presented in this Note.
Section V: The method of dealing with the sensitive and the intellectual in metaphysics
23. In all sciences whose principles are given intuitively,
between logical and real uses of the intellect, see the second paragraph
of 5 on page 5.]
Immanuel Kant
24.
In metaphysical matters concerning the sensitive/intellectual line, method boils down to this all-important
rule: take great care not to let the home-grown principles of
sensitive knowledge emigrate and move over into intellectual
affairs. In any intellectually enunciated judgement the
predicate is a condition without which the subject is asserted
to be unthinkable, so the predicate is the source of our
knowledge of that subject. [The first clause in that sentence
may strike you as wild, but consider: If a judgment S is P purports to
be intellectual rather than sensitive, the basis for it cant be anything
empirical; so it has to be on the intellectual side of the line, i.e. must
preting S is P as saying that if you dont bring P into your thought you
This provides a fruitful and easy criterion for distinguishing principles that only state laws of sensitive knowledge from ones that also teach
something about the objects themselves. If the predicate is an intellectual concept, it applies to the subject itself, no matter how sensitively it is
thought. But if the predicate is a sensitive concept, it wont be valid of the intellectually thought subject of a judgement; because the laws of sensitive
knowledge are not conditions of the possibility of things themselves. For example, the popular axiom Whatever exists is somewhere fails this test: its
predicate is somewhere contains the conditions of sensitive knowledge, so it cant be applied generally to the subject of a judgementi.e. it cant
be applied to everything that exists. . . . But should the proposition be converted so that the intellectual concept becomes the predicate, it turns out
to be truenamely, the truth that whatever is somewhere exists.
20
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Any such axiom would be spurious and rashly and hazardously asserted, if not outright false. Here is why: since S
is conceived intellectually it pertains to the object, whereas
P (since it involves space and time) pertains only to the
conditions of sensitive human knowledge; perhaps that isnt
the only kind of knowledge; and if it isnt, then P doesnt
cover the whole territory and thus doesnt grip onto S itself.
And the reason why the intellect is so easily subject to this
fallacy of switching is that it is led astray by the authority of
a certain other rule that is utterly genuine:
If something cant be known by any intuition at all,
that means that it is unthinkable and thus impossible.
Now, we cant by any effort of the mind have or even
imagine any intuition except the one that fits the form of
space and time. So we are led to regard every intuition that
isnt spatio-temporale.g. Gods pure intellectual intuition.
which Plato calls an Ideaas impossible. And so we subject
all possible things to the sensitive axioms of space and time.
26. [The items in the following three-part classification are the topics
of 27, 28 and 29 respectively. After that, 30 brings the work to a close.]
Space and time are conceived as embracing everything that meets the senses in any way. The laws of the human mind dont allow it any intuition
of something not contained in space and time. We can compare this first switching axiom with something that isnt strictly a switching axiom but
rather a trick of the imagination: Whatever exists has space and time IN it, meaning that every substance is extended and continually changing.
Broad-brush thinkers are tied down by this law of the imagination, but even they easily see that it applies only to the imaginations efforts give an
outline of the appearance of things, and doesnt apply to the conditions of existence.
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[In a note at the end of the work, Kant remarks that the need for brevity
has led him to say things that might seem rashly dogmatic, and he agrees
that further explanation of some of them should be provided in a context
where no length-limit has been imposed. He cites this present passage
as an example, and offers this explanation:]
Immanuel Kant
of measurement;
(c2 ) There is a definite number of simple things constituting any body;
openly proclaim their origin in the nature of sensitive knowledge; and whatever truth there may be in them they labour
under the undoubted blemish of their origin.
Now for case (ii), involving the proposition that Whatever
is impossible contradicts itself. In this case, as with (i),
the concept of time serves as the medium in which the
concept of the predicate (self-contradictory) is formed. This
second switching axiom arises from recklessly converting the
principle of non-contradiction,
PNC: Whatever is self-contradictory is impossible.
The concept of time comes into PNC, which declares the
impossibility of any state of affairs in which contradictory
things are applied to one thing at one time, i.e.
Whatever simultaneously is and is not is impossible.
quantity);
(b1 ) The world manifests its cause;
23
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wrote. He should have said . . . under which we can see that something
exists contingently.]
29. The switching axioms in class (3) (see 26) are like those
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant