Kant's argument for transcendental idealism in the transcendental aesthetic

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110 (1pt1):47-75 (2010)
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Abstract

This paper gives an interpretation of Kant's argument for transcendental idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic. I argue against a common way of reading this argument, which sees Kant as arguing that substantive a priori claims about mind-independent reality would be unintelligible because we cannot explain the source of their justification. I argue that Kant's concern with how synthetic a priori propositions are possible is not a concern with the source of their justification, but with how they can have objects. I argue that Kant's notion of intuition needs to be understood as a kind of representation which involves the presence to consciousness of the object it represents, and that this means that a priori intuition cannot present us with a mind-independent feature of reality.

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References found in this work

In Defense of Pure Reason.Laurence BonJour - 1998 - Cambridge University Press.
Kant's Transcendental Idealism.Henry E. Allison - 1988 - Yale University Press.
Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.Bertrand Russell - 1911 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11:108--28.
Kant.Paul Guyer - 2006 - New York: Routledge.
The possibility of knowledge.Quassim Cassam - 2007 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 74 (1):125-141.

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