Abstract

This chapter discusses two common themes: first, an argument about ignorance of things in themselves, viewed as a kind of epistemic humility; and, second, an argument, perhaps even a transcendental argument about the conditions of coexistence, the relation that world mates bear to each other. In Kant's early work, he explored the metaphysically necessary conditions of coexistence in his early work, and later, the “transcendentally” necessary conditions of the experience of coexistence. Many of Kant's early writings explore a kind of contingency that troubled him long before Hume is supposed to have awoken him from his dogmatic slumbers. According to the Principle of Coexistence, substances do not coexist in the same world unless they bear "mutual relations", causal relations, such as the physical forces of Newtonian attraction towards each other. The chapter considers how one could avoid Humility by moving to causal structuralism.