Some artistic representations—the painting of a hat in a famous picture by Rembrandt is an example—are able to present vividly the character of what they represent precisely by calling attention to their medium of representation. There is a puzzle about this whose structure, I argue, is analogous to that of a familiar Kantian problem for traditional realism. I offer a precise characterization of the puzzle, before arguing that an analogue for the case of representation to the Kantian solution to the (...) problem for traditional realism is implausible. I offer an alternative solution to the puzzle about representation which also explains why we should be interested in artistic representation in the first place. I close with the outline of a possible realist response to the traditional Kantian problem. (shrink)

In The Philosophical Criticism, Alois Riehl developed a realistic interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism based on his theory of space and time. In doing so, more than 100 years ago, he formulated an interpretation of the relation between the thing in itself and appearances that is discussed in current research as the metaphysical „dual aspect“ interpretation, although it is rarely attributed to Riehl. To reconstruct Riehl’s position, the research results of comparative studies on Moritz Schlick are systematically extended and applied (...) to the current debate on Kant’s transcendental idealism. (shrink)

Kantian Humility (KH) holds that the intrinsic properties of objects are unknowable for agents such as ourselves. Categorial properties, such as being an object, present a potential threat to KH. Cowling (2010) argues that knowing KH to be true requires knowledge of categorial properties. However, if such properties are shown to be intrinsic properties, then KH is committed to their being unknowable. I defend KH by presenting three alternative responses to this challenge. First, that categorial properties are not properties in (...) the sense relevant to KH. Second, that if they are properties, they are not intrinsic properties. Third, that if they are intrinsic properties, KH is not committed to their being unknowable. I also show how these responses can be applied to a related objection to KH offered by Moore (2001). (shrink)

To judge by the title, one would expect that interpretations of the Critique of Pure Reason would prioritize the division of the book most about reason and its critique: The Transcendental Dialectic. But the Dialectic is surprisingly secondary in the most established interpretive approaches. This article argues as follows: There is a problem that contributes to explaining the lack of popularity: The problem of how arguments really based in the Dialectic itself really promise to ground a broader project in theoretical (...) philosophy, of the scope of the Critique. But the problem can be solved: One aim important in the critique is critical argument against rationalist metaphysics. The Dialectic must play a central role in such critique, given a difficulty concerning begging the question. The positive claims of the Dialectic, about reason and the unconditioned, are necessary for such an argument, and the Dialectic gives them enough defense for that purpose. Finally, there are reasons to take seriously Kant’s promises that the Antinomy of the Dialectic can support the weight in such an argument, without begging the question. The article concludes that a Dialectic-first approach to the Critique is viable and worth further development. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Este artículo examina la doctrina del Idealismo Trascendental de Kant en relación con el Problema del Mundo Externo, abordándola desde la perspectiva de la Filosofía de la Percepción. La investigación propone que hay argumentos sólidos para evaluar la doctrina kantiana bajo estos criterios y sugiere que, al hacerlo, se desprende que el Idealismo Trascendental no puede ser clasificado como una postura idealista que niegue la existencia de objetos o propiedades extramentales. Este análisis aporta una comprensión más profunda del alcance y (...) las implicaciones del Idealismo Trascendental de Kant en el contexto de la filosofía de la percepción, contribuyendo así al debate académico sobre la naturaleza del conocimiento y la realidad. (shrink)

In this chapter, I show that there is at least one crucial, non-short, argument, which does not involve arguments about spatiotemporality, why Kant’s subjectivism about the possibility of knowledge, argued in the Transcendental Deduction, must lead to idealism. This has to do with the fact that given the implications of the discursivity thesis, namely, that the domain of possible determination of objects is characterised by limitation, judgements of experience can never reach the completely determined individual, i.e. the thing in itself (...) or the unlimited real, but only objects as objects of possible experience. As such, it can be shown by reference to a key argument from Kant, that Hegel’s famous criticism that Kant is not licensed, on the basis of his core arguments concerning the original-synthetic unity of apperception, to restrict our knowledge to appearances, is mistaken on purely systematic grounds. More specifically, I argue that idealism follows already from the constraints that the use of the categories, in particular the categories of quality, places on the very conceivability of things in themselves. My claim is that, although it is not only possible but also necessary to think things in themselves, it does not follow that by merely thinking them we have a full grasp of the nature of things in themselves, as some important commentators claim we have. We must therefore distinguish between two kinds of conceiving of things in themselves: conceiving in the standard sense of ‘forming the notion of’, and conceiving in the narrow sense of ‘having a determinate intellectual grasp’. So although we must be able notionally to think things in themselves, as the grounds of their appearances, we cannot even conceive, through pure concepts, of how they are in themselves in any determinate, even if merely intellectual, sense. To put it differently, we cannot have a positive conception of things in themselves (this is in line with Kant’s distinction between noumena in the negative and positive senses; cf. B307–9). For support, I resort to a much overlooked chapter in the Critique, concerning the transcendental Ideal, where Kant discusses what it is for a thing to be a thing in itself proper, namely, something that is thoroughly determined. This concerns the real ontological conditions of things, which are not satisfied by the modal categories alone, namely, their existence conditions. I claim that the chief reason why, given Kant’s view of determinative judgement, we cannot determine a thing in itself is because of two connected reasons: (1) a thing in itself is already fully determined and therefore not further determinable and (2) we cannot possibly determine all of the thing’s possible determinations. In this context, I also discuss the notion of material (not: empirical) synthesis—of which Kant speaks in the chapter on the transcendental Ideal—which must be presupposed as the ground of the formal a priori synthesis that grounds possible experience. This material synthesis, which is an idea of reason that defines a thing as thoroughly determined with regard to all of its possible predicates and has mere regulative status, can by implication not be determined by the forms of the understanding, which synthesise only a limited set of predicates. As a result, given this definition of ‘thing in itself’, any object (appearance) as at best44 a limited set of determinations of the thing can never be numerically identical to the thing in itself as thoroughly determined individual. This undercuts a standard assumption about the identity relation between appearances and things in themselves in many contemporary interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism. (shrink)