J. Everet Green Kant's Copernican Revolution

KANT'S
COPERNICAN
REVOLUTION
_ = L=
The Transcendental Horizon
J. Everet Green
O D T 'Z
M. E. T. , LIBRARY
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Kant's Copernican revolution : the transcendental horizon / J. Everet
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804~Contributions in theory of knowledge.
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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.
v
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 79
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
Chapter VI 99
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
Conclusion 120
Bibliography 128
Index 155
x
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. Reinhoi, 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
2 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 3
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.
4 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 well-
known 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 5
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.
6 Introduction
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 7
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
8 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 9
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 Natur-wissenschaft," Die
Naturwissenshaften, vol. 21, 1933, p. 626.
19
Gerard Vollmer, "Mesocom and Objective Knowledge," Concepts and
Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology, ed. Franz M. Wuketits, Dordrecht
D. Reidel, 1984, p. 77.
10 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 11
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 13
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.
14 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 breakthrough 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 (non-
ontological) 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: Wissenschafts-
geschichte, Vol I, (Oldenbourg Vienna: Munich, 1979).
'Critique of Pure Reason^ Bxxvi-Bxxxv.

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.

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. Wley'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 episte-
mology 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.
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.
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.
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
Ibid., p. 3
46
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
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.
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.
28 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 fr Geschichte Philosophie 61
(1979): 300.
60
Richard Aquila, Representational Mind (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1983), p. 93.
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
t 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.
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
Identitt und Objektivitt 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 transcen-
dental 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).
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 elabor-
ation 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
t 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.
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 trans-
cendental 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.
paradigm, but rather, must be a part of an entirely different epistemo-
logical 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.

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.
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.

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
Overview of Recent Debate About Kant s Critical Philosophy 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 Phnomenologische Interpretation Von Kants

Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (1927-1928).
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.

Overview ofRecent Debate About Kant's Critical Philosophy 39
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 then-
knowledge on synthetic a priori principles. These principles taken as
'Ibid., B XLIV, p. 37.
Ibid., B xvii.
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, Bxv-
xxiv, 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.

42 Synthetic A Priori Judgments
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.
Synthetic A Priori Judgments 43
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.

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).
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, there-
fore, 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.
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 mathe-
matics 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.

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.
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.
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.
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.

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.
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).
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
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.

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.

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 trans-
cendentally 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.
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).
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.
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).
Kant 's Transcendental Idealism 61
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.
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.
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 non-
empirical 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.

Kant's Transcendental Idealism 65
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.
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.

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-in-
themselves 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.

68 Kant's Transcendental Idealism
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
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).
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
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.
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.
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 under-
standing 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).
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.

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).
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-in-
themselves 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.

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.
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.
80 The Transcendental Analytic
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.
The Transcendental Analytic 81
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
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; 154-
164; 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.
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.
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.
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.

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.
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
IbidB161,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.
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.
The Transcendental Analytic
m
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.

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
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.
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.

239
A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (1888), Book 1, Pt.
4, Sec. 2.
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 self-
knowledge man is a being of distances at once revealing and concealing
^Critique ofPure Reason, A 343/B 401.
'Ibid., A 402.
2
Ibid.,B158.
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.
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
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.
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 non-
objectively 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.
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.
100 Causality and Objectivity
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.
Causality and Objectivity 101
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.

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.
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.

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.
"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.
[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.
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.
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
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.
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.

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
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
285
Lovejoy, "On Kant's Reply to Hume," Kant: Disputed Questions, p.
303.
'Strawson, The Bound ofSense, p. 137.

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.
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

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
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.

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.

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.

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).
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.
Conclusion 121
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.

122 Conclusion
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 (1768-
1834), 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.
Conclusion 123
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.

124 Conclusion
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 pre-
ontological understanding of Being which is operative in every attempt
on the part of Dasein to understand a being as such.
Conclusion 125
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.
126 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.
Conclusion 127
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 155
application 1, 6, 19, 35, 58, 87,

88,91, ...102
apprehension 84, 92, 106, 107,
113
aposteriori 4, 6, 42, 44, 54, Aquila 28
108 architectonic 39
apriori 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, arithmetic 34, 88
10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, Arthur Melnick... 26
23, 25, 27, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 36, assumption 1, 12, 30, 31, 32,
38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 44, 53, 60, 70, 88, 106, 124, 127
47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, astronomy 13, 15
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, B
115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122,
123, 124, 125, 126, 127 Beck 8, 16, 27, 46, 47,
abbreviated 75 69,72,79,84, 111
Absolute 13, 42, 43, 56, 87, Bennett 27, 29, 31, 80, 81,
115 83,89
abstruse 92 Berkeley 57, 60, 65, 71, 72,
accomplishment.. 12, 107 73, 120
achievement 16,49,71 Bertrand 14,53
Aesthetic 1,19, 49, 73, 84, biology 9,10,64
86,96, 104, 120 Bird 24,25
aggregation 102
agnostic 27
Allison 16, 28, 41, 73, 74,
75
alternation 106 Caird 48
alternative 14, 16, 26, 88 Cartesian 22,52,93,94
analysis 4, 9, 14, 27, 31, 40, Cassirer 20,22
42, 44, 45, 48, 54, 62, 67, 68, 76,
Castaneda 44
80, 82, 84, 85, 88, 95, 102, 103,
categories 4, 7, 10, 16, 19, 23,
116, 125 24,29,31,32,33,35,38,58,63,
analytic 1, 4, 19, 24, 29, 37, 66,68,69,72,77,78,79,80,81,
41,44,45,46,47,48,49,51,70, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93, 94, 96, 97,
79,80,83,87,89,91,99,101, 107, 99, 102, 107, 115, 116, 119, 122,
111, 112, 117, 125 123, 124, 126, 127
appearance 13, 17, 24, 25, 26,
causal law 15,99, 111, 115,
27, 28, 50, 55, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64,
117, 121
65, 67, 68, 69, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77,
causality 3, 8, 30, 49, 105,
97, 107, 110, 113, 126
106, 107, 108, 110, 113, 121
apperception 34, 35, 68, 85, 86, chemistry 64
87,89,90,91,92
156 Index
Chisholm, Roderick M. cosmology 37

91 criterion 42, 43, 44, 46, 60,
cognition 5, 7, 10, 14, 28, 31, 113, 114
38,42,63,65,67,68,76,77,91, critical 3,5,9, 19,20,21,
100, 101,102, 109, 115,116, 124 22, 24, 25, 28, 33, 39, 40, 46, 48,
comprehend 20, 120, 127 49,55,61,69,88,93,101, 112,
comprehension... 22,101 122, 124
conceive 25, 32, 77, 78, 113, Critique 1,2,6,9, 11, 12,
120 13, 14, 15, 17, 19,20,22,23,24,
concept 5,6,7,8, 15, 19, 29,30,31,33,34,36,37,38,39,
25,26,32,34,35,41,44,45,46, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 47, 49, 53, 55,
47, 48, 51, 53, 55, 65, 68, 70, 74, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 70,
76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 85, 87, 91, 92, 73,74,75,76,79,80,81,82,84,
95, 96, 98, 100, 102, 105, 106, 107, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100,
108, 110, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 101,103, 105, 110, 111, 112, 114,
119, 120, 121, 122, 125 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122,
conception 3, 10, 13, 22, 26, 123, 125, 126
52, 56, 68, 76, 80, 125
conceptual 15, 32, 44, 45, 46,
52,69,75,91, 110, 113, 116 D
conceptualization 30,92
conscious 17, 24, 29, 31, 32,
Dasein 23,31,122, 124
45,69,81,86,91, 103, 104,120
definitive 9,92,100
consistency 55
demonstrable 15,117
constitute 13, 18, 24, 30, 57, Descartes 22, 44, 60, 65, 82,
63, 84, 97, 125 86, 103, 120
constitution 42, 50, 54, 62, 65, determination 14, 24, 31, 37, 43,
66, 74, 76 58,60,69,77,85, 104, 113, 117
construction 17, 34, 47, 48, 108 dimensional 54
constructive 47, 48 Ding an Sich 75
contemporaneous 83 discursive 14,90,119
contemporaries... 70
Dissertation 56, 74
Contemporary.... 49, 91
distinction 6, 24, 25, 28, 38,
content 8, 14, 30, 31, 36,
41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 52, 55, 64, 66,
48, 52, 57, 58, 60, 68, 72, 79, 80, 67, 70, 72, 75, 76, 90, 95, 101, 127
90,97,98, 102, 104, 118, 120, 121
doctrines 1, 13, 15, 45, 49
contingent 43, 44, 52, 94
dogmas 15
controversies 20, 23
dogmatic 8, 9, 15, 16, 24,
controversy 4, 22, 23, 24, 33
111, 112
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 157
element 3, 5, 17, 19, 48, 52, faculties 17, 80, 84, 89, 91,
71,84 121
empirical 3, 6, 8, 12, 18, 19, faculty 3, 14, 16, 65, 79,
24,25,30,31,33,36,38,39,45, 85,87,95, 101, 107
47, 50, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 61, 63, Fichte, J. Gottlieb 9, 101, 122
64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, Findlay 25,26,29,77
76,77,78,79,81,83,85,86,87, Fisher 70
88,94,95,96,99, 102, 103, 104, foundationalist.... 93
105, 107, 113, 116, 117, 118, 119, framework 5, 28, 30, 52, 69,
120, 121, 125, 127 71,75,95, 100
Enlightenment.... 20, 23, 122 Freedom 23, 28
episode 92 fundamental 13, 22, 28, 31, 33,
epistemic 4, 12, 14, 25, 26, 36, 37, 39, 44, 45, 55, 56, 57, 60,
30, 74, 92 65,86,87,93,95, 100, 110, 120,
epistemology 1, 9, 10, 20, 22, 24, 123, 124, 125, 126
39, 56, 87, 95
epitomized 41
Euclid 53
Ewing,A.C 14,20,111
existence 3, 5, 6, 10, 15, 49, Galileo 2
60, 61, 62, 72, 73, 74, 81, 88, 92, generalization 54
103, 108, 109, 116, 120, 127 genesis 100
experience 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, geocentricism 15
13, 16, 17, 19,22,23,24,25,26, geometry 33, 34, 48, 53, 88, 125
27,29,30,31,32,33,35,36,37, God 23,45,74
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, H
83,84,86,87,88,89,90,91,92,
93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, Heidegger 4, 9, 21, 22, 24, 30,
102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 37, 38, 122, 123, 124, 125
109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, Heidelberg 20, 21, 22, 30, 32,
119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 70
127 Henrich 30, 32
experiential 19 Hintikka 48, 53, 69
explicate 4,79,80 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
158 Index
hypostatizing 25 investigation, 18, 57, 67, 123

hypothesis 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, irreversibility24, 111, 113
61, 125
hypothetically 13
JonnFindlay 25, 29, 77
idealism 11, 29, 30, 55, 57,

60, 61, 62, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, K
80, 120, 126
idealist 56, 57, 71 Kalin ....69
identification 52, 94 Kant 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
illusion 57,73, 116 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19,20,
imagination 35, 38, 47, 97, 102, 21,22,23,24 , 25, 26, 27,, 28, 29,
104 30,31,32,33 , 34, 35, 36, 37, 38,
immediacy 53 39, 40, 41, 42 , 43, 44, 45, 46, 47,
Immortality 23 48,49,50,51 , 52, 53, 54 55, 56,
implausible 13 57, 58, 60, 61 , 62, 63, 64 65, 66,
incomprehensible 27, 114 67, 68, 69, 70 ,71,72,73. 74, 75,
inconsistent 25 76, 77, 79, 80,81,82,83 , 84, 85,
independent 3, 8, 13, 27, 32, 41, 86, 87, 88, 89 90,91,92, 93, 94,
51,62,64,66,71,73,77,94,95, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 01, 102,
100, 121, 124 103, 104, 105 , 106, 108 109, 110,
induction 12,13,15,16 111, 112, 113 114, 115 116, 117,
inner sense 57,85,102,104 118, 119, 120. 121, 122 123, 124,
innovation 12,15,16 125, 126, 127
insight 2, 16, 17, 33, 40, Kant Studien 14, 20, 69, 89
45,52,63,65,101,103,116 Kantian 10, 15, 16, 19,20,
intelligence 94 21,22,23,24 25,42,51,53,56,
intelligible 19, 28, 49, 69, 103 62,65,67,71 , 73, 74, 76, 77, 84,
interaction 8,61, 115, 123 95, 100, 101, 102, 110, 117, 122,
interpretation 16, 21, 24, 28, 31, 124
37, 53, 62, 63, 66, 70, 73, 75, 76, knowledge 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,
77, 82, 93, 124, 125 9, 10, 12, 13 14,15,16,17,19,21,
interpreters 4, 20, 31, 73, 80 22, 23, 24, 25,26,27,29,30,31,
intersubjectively.. 91 32, 33, 34, 35. 36, 37, 38, 39, 40,
introspection 64 41, 42, 43, 44. 45, 46, 47, 49, 52,
intuition 5, 7, 10, 14, 16, 26, 53, 54, 55, 56. 57, 60, 61, 62, 63,
27, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 45, 46, 65, 68, 69, 70f 72, 74, 78, 79, 80,
47,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56, 81, 83, 84, 85 86,87,89,90,91,
57, 60, 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 92, 93, 94, 95: 96, 98, 99, 100, 101,
76,79,85,94,95,96,101,102, 102, 103, 105 , 107,109,111,115,
104, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 122,
125, 126
Index 159
116, 117, 118, 119,121,122, 123,

124, 125, 126
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,
legitimate 19, 24, 63, 99 125
legitimization 44, 92 necessity 3, 5, 8, 33, 42, 43,
Lehrer, Keith 91 44,45,46,51,69,81,86,87, 103,
Leibniz 41, 44, 47, 56, 74 105,106, 113
limitation 19, 26, 51 nonsequitur 111,112,113
Loemaker 44 notion 19, 24, 25, 26, 27,
Lorenz 10, 61 45, 49, 53, 65, 74, 79, 88, 99, 102,
Lovejoy, Arthur I l l , 112 108, 113, 115
noumena 28
M
manifestation 55,64
o
Marburg 20,22,124 object 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
mathematics 4, 34, 39, 40, 42, 14,17,21,22,25,26,27,28,30,
44,46,47,48,53,82, 125 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 40, 46, 47, 48,
Meerbote 27,28 50,51,53,54,56,61,63,64,66,
Melnick, Arthur.. 26, 27, 114 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 80,
metaphysic 39, 116 81,85,86,87,89,90,91,92,93,
metaphysical 9, 15, 17, 23, 24, 94,95,96,98, 100, 101, 102, 103,
49,69,75,96, 101, 117 105, 106, 110, 113, 114, 115, 116,
metaphysics 12, 13, 15,17, 22, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125,
23,24,31,38,39,40,44,47,49, 127
74,76,80,92,93,95, 111,116, objective validity 5, 6, 24, 33, 35, 46,
122, 123, 124 80,81,83,89,95,96,99, 108,114
method 2,4, 12, 13, 14, 15, objectivity 7, 17, 24, 30, 31,
16, 23, 24, 33, 36, 47, 48, 82, 98, 77, 81, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 96, 97,
100, 117, 123, 125, 126 107, 111, 119, 126
mind 5, 7, 13, 16, 22, 42, observation 15, 54, 55, 68, 103,
44,46,50,51,54,62,63,65,69, 111
71, 72, 73, 74, 80, 84, 85, 87, 90, ontic 24,37
92,94,97,99, 109, 121 ontology 4, 22, 23, 31, 37,
Moltke21,72, 111 38,39, 112, 124
mysteries 33 origin 24, 83, 86, 87, 88,
mysterious 72 96, 108, 117
orthodox 82
outer intuition 54,104,116
160 Index
projection 12, 16, 66, 108

Prolegomena 8, 16, 34, 56, 57,
75,79,84, 114, 117
paradigm 32, 33, 39, 65 properties 48, 50, 54, 58, 63,
paradoxical 88 83, 119,121, 126,127
Parson 53 proposition 8, 17, 43, 44, 45,
Paton, H. J 14, 20, 23, 71, 82, 122 48,54,93, 108, 116, 117, 118, 119
permanence 30 Ptolemaic 14, 15
phenomena 6, 28, 56, 61, 63,
64,68, 107, 127
phenomenology.. 23
philosophy 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 14, 15, R
16, 17, 19,20,21,22,23,24,25,
26,28,29,31,33,36,37,38,39, rational 19, 23, 36, 43, 90,
40,41,42,44,45,48,49,51,53, 93,94, 100, 101, 111, 119, 121
56, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, realist 56, 57
89,92,93,99, 101, 112, 118, 121, reality 4, 6, 13, 23, 24, 30,
122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127 31,35,38,50,52,55,63,65,66,
physical 6,30,37,49,63, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 90, 94, 95,
64,69,71, 127 96, 104, 113, 126
physics 4, 33, 42, 44, 82, Reason 1, 2,6,9, 11, 12, 13,
125 14,15,16, 17,19,20,22,23,24,
polemic 20, 24 29,31,33,34,36,37,38,39,41,
possibility 1, 9, 16, 17, 23, 30, 42, 45, 47, 49, 53, 55, 57, 58, 60,
32,33,35,36,38,40,44,49,51, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 70, 73, 76, 79,
53,65,74,79,80,81,83,84,88, 80, 81, 82, 84, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95,
89,91,96,98,99, 104, 107, 113, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103, 105, 110,
115, 116, 117, 118, 121, 123, 125 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119,
possiblity 16, 17, 23, 30, 32, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126
33,35,36,38,39,40,44,49,51, Refutation 60,73
53, 65, 74, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 88, representation 3, 4, 7, 47, 50, 53,
89, 91, 96, 98 55, 57, 58, 68, 85, 86, 93, 102, 104,
Prauss 28, 63, 75, 76, 77 120, 126
precedents 15 Revolution 1, 2, 13, 14, 15, 16,
predecessors 16, 41, 52, 65, 95 19,20, 33,39, 74, 87, 97,.123
presupposition.... 12, 17, 31, 107, Rorty, Richard.... 29, 53, 69, 89
114, 121 rules 7, 13, 17,25,32,
pretence 39 35,79,97,98, 100,106,107,115,
pretensions 12 117, 122
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, saltus 98
112, 113, 114,116, 117,121,124 schemata 58, 99, 102
Index 161
schematism 101, 102 Swartz, Robert J.. 91

science 2, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, synthesis 6, 7, 30, 35, 42, 77,
22,23,24,31,33,39,42,68,77, 79, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 102,
88,93, 100, 101, 116, 119, 121, 103, 106, 107, 109, 119, 120, 125,
122, 124, 125 126
scientific 3, 6, 9, 10, 12, 15, synthetic 3, 4, 8, 9, 15, 16,
22, 29, 40, 57, 67, 124 18,22,23,34,35,38,39,40,41,
scientist 13 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 79, 82,
selfhood 93, 94 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 97, 99,
sensibility 6, 7, 26, 38, 50, 51, 112, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 124,
54, 55, 56, 58, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68, 125
74,76,80,86,95, 101, 104, 110, synthetic propositions
116, 126 44, 46, 48, 96
sensible 7, 14, 26, 49, 50, syntheticity 17
51,56,58,60,66,67,68,71,83,
96, 101,102, 110, 115,117, 126
sensory 4, 33, 35, 36, 58, T
62,76, 108, 109, 121, 127
sensuous 25 temporal 8, 24, 27, 29, 49,
Smith 2, 14,20,21,48, 50, 52, 56, 60, 70, 71, 72, 74, 95,
49, 82, 111 102, 104, 115, 119, 120, 121, 126
space 5, 6, 7, 13, 30, 48, theorem 79
49,50,51,52,54,55,56,57,60, theoretical 1, 4, 19, 26, 32, 36,
61,67,72,73,86,96, 103, 104, 38,42,84, 101, 119, 123, 125
105, 120, 125, 126, 127 things-in-themselves
spatio-temporal... 27, 30, 49, 52, 56, 28,67
70,71,72,95 thinkables 26
Stahl 2 time 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 13,24,
Stenius 48 26, 30, 34, 42, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50,
strategy 81 51,52,54,55,57,58,60,61,67,
Strawson 28, 29, 30, 31, 52, 68, 72, 73, 80, 86, 91, 92, 96, 98,
53,70,71,72,80,81,82,83,89, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 110, 113,
95, 111, 112, 113 114, 117, 120,124, 125,126,127
Stroud 29, 69 Torricelli 2
structure 8, 9, 16, 20, 22, 24, Transcendental... 1, 16, 17, 19, 22,
26, 39, 42, 49, 52, 63, 65, 80, 82, 24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,
84, 85, 91, 98 35,36,37,38,40,49,50,51,55,
sub specie aeternitatis 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66,
75 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75,
subjective deduction 76,77,78,79,80,81,83,84,85,
82 86,87,88,89,91,92,93,96,98,
substitution 4, 15 99, 101, 104, 116, 120, 126
subsumable 27, 109 Transcendental Aesthetic
subversion 15 19
supersensible 70, 72, 126
162 Index
transcendental argument universal, 7, 8, 23, 32, 34, 47, 58, 77,
16,79 86,87,90, 103, 106, 108, 110, 112,
transcendental proof 116, 118, 126
17, 103,117, 118 universality 5, 8, 42, 43, 44, 87, 126
treatise 22, 125 unknowability 25, 69, 105
u V
ultimate 16, 17, 60, 84, 97, 124 verification 26, 69
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, w
101, 107, 116, 120, 122, 123, 124, Wittgenstein, L 9, 89
126 Wolff, Christian21, 25, 29, 46, 47, 80,
81,82,83,111, 112

J. Everet Green Kant&#39;s Copernican Revolution

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KANT'S

The Transcendental Horizon

University Press of America, Inc.

12 Hid's Copse Rd.

339116 All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 0-7618-0748-9 (cloth: alk. ppr.)

B2799.K7 G74 1997 METO LIBRARY

Kant's Copernican revolution : the tram

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum

This volume is an excellent introduction to Kant's critical thinking,

Green's discussion of the "Transcendental Analytic" and the

Finally, one comes away from a reading of Green's essay with a

Kant would never deny the constructive character of human

But contrary to these critics, I will attempt to present Kant as a

There are only two possible ways in which synthetic

The a priori representation does not produce the object, as is the

Knowledge, therefore, was conditional upon an independently

The proud name of ontology must give way to the'more modest

In a letter to Marcus Herz on February 21, 1772, Kant asks: "what is

''ibid., A 247/B 303, p. 264.

Arnulf Zweig, Kant Philosophical Correspondence (Chicago: University

Kant, human knowledge is composed of both a priori and a posteriori

Chapter Four where it will be shown that Kant draws a distinction

is an act of spontaneity performed by the understanding, and only if

"Ibid. A 77/B 107, B 129-130.

chaos of sensations. It still requires the concept, since "perceptions without

the triumphant breakthrough in thought which the Critique of Pure

discussions in biology, genetic psychology and developmental

One has to postulate the existence of innate teaching

Konrad Lorenz, Behind the Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of

Critical Philosophy And The Copernican

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must

Copernicus impresses Kant not so much for his particular

Critique ofPure Reason, Bxvi, p. 22.

The change in point of view, analogous to this hypothesis, which is

Kant resembles Copernicus only in that both disavow established

Critique of Pure Reason, Bxxii, p. 25.

because we depend on something given to our faculty of sensible

A considerable amount of literature has developed regarding the

blind induction has been replaced by the method of projecting

{Revolution in Science, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1985, pp.

'Critique of Pure Reason^ Bxxvi-Bxxxv.

In the Kantian sense, transcendental is used to refer to the ultimate

and knowledge is dependent on the structure and activity of our mind.

experiment is itself a species of knowledge which involves

'Critique of Pure Reason, A 158/B 197, p. 194.

''Ibid., Bxvii-vviii, pp. 22-23.

Such propositions are synthetic and a priori: synthetic because they

Overview of Recent Debate About Kant's

The central element of this necessary limitation is a principle which

controversy. Heidegger is at one with the Marburg school in his view

Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James

rational man. Thus, the Critique of Pure Reason is interpreted as

merely empirical perspective, but rather from an epistemic one that is

speaking of such entities. The explanation is "that Kant operates with

thing".51 In fact, "it is the notion of a concept quite literally

"Jonathan Bennett, Kant's Dialectic (New York: Cambridge University

Generally speaking, the transcendental distinction between

H. E. Allison, "Things in Themselves, Noumena, and the

The other theme which I will discuss is the transcendental deduction.

P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966).

an awareness of objects that can be judged irrespective of the actual

Strawson, Bound of Sense, p. 24.

J. Everet Green Kant's Copernican Revolution

J. Everet Green Kant's Copernican Revolution