Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-75dct Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-03T08:01:21.525Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Kant on Mind-Dependence: Possible or Actual Experience?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2023

Markus Kohl*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Abstract

In Kant’s idealism, all spatiotemporal objects depend on the human mind in a certain way. A central issue here is whether the existence of spatiotemporal things requires that these things are, at least at some point, objects of some actual experience or of a merely possible experience. In this essay, I argue (on textual and philosophical grounds) for the latter view: spatiotemporal things exist (or spatiotemporal events occur) if they are objects of a (suitably qualified) possible experience.

Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Kantian Review

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abaci, Uygar (2019) Kant’s Revolutionary Theory of Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allais, Lucy (2015) Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and his Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allison, Henry (2004) Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allison, Henry (2015) Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. An Analytical-Historical Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ameriks, Karl (2000) Kant’s Theory of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ameriks, Karl (2003) Interpreting Kant’s Critiques. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aquila, Richard (1984) Representational Mind: A Study of Kant’s Theory of Knowledge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Berkeley, George (1979) Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. Ed. Robert, M. Adams. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing. Google Scholar
Chignell, Andrew (2014) ‘Modal Motivations for Noumenal Ignorance: Knowledge, Cognition and Coherence’. Kant-Studien, 105(4), 573–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Arthur (1999) Possible Experience. Understanding Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Guyer, Paul (1987) Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hatfield, Gary (1990) The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hatfield, Gary (1992) ‘Empirical, Rational and Transcendental Psychology: Psychology as Science and as Philosophy’. In Guyer, Paul (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 200–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson, Hud (1994) Kant’s Compatibilism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Jauernig, Anja (2021) The World According to Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kohl, Markus (2021) ‘A Priori Intuition and Transcendental Necessity in Kant’s Idealism’. European Journal of Philosophy, 29(4), 827–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kohl, Markus (forthcoming) Kant on Freedom and Rational Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Langton, Rae (1998) Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Leech, Jessica (2017) ‘Kant’s Material Condition of Real Possibility’. In Sinclair, Mark (ed.), The Actual and the Possible: Modality and Metaphysics in Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 94116.Google Scholar
Longuenesse, Béatrice (1998) Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshall, Colin (2013) ‘Kant’s One Self and the Appearance/Thing-in-Itself Distinction’. Kant-Studien, 104(4), 421–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosefeldt, Tobias (2007) ‘Dinge an Sich und Sekundaere Qualitaeten’. In Stolzenburg, Jurgen (ed.), Kant in der Gegenwart (Berlin: De Gruyter), 167212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schafer, Karl (2021) ‘Transcendental Philosophy as Capacities-First Philosophy’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 103(3), 661–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stang, Nicholas (2012) ‘Kant on Complete Determination and Infinite Judgement’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 20(6), 1117–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stang, Nicholas (2016) Kant’s Modal Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stephenson, Andrew (2015) ‘Kant, the Paradox of Knowability, and the Meaning of “Experience”’. Philosopher’s Imprint, 15(27), 119.Google Scholar
Strawson, P. F. (1966) The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Van Cleve, James (1999) Problems from Kant. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Warren, Daniel (2001) Reality and Impenetrability in Kant’s Philosophy of Nature. London: Routledge University Press.Google Scholar
Watkins, Eric (2004) Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Westphal, Kenneth (2005) Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar