Themes in Kant’s Metaphysics and Ethics

In the opening essay Melnick develops a compelling case for the idea that Kant held to a constructivist theory of space and time. By this he means that space and time exist only in the “flowing construction” by which pure intuition, and later the productive synthesis of the transcendental imagination, generate seamless continuities between one sensation and another. The exposition moves from the Transcendental Aesthetic to the Transcendental Deduction, where Melnick claims that the cognition of space and time is a matter of bringing this flowing construction under rules specified by the categories of the understanding. In his approach to the Analogies of Experience, Melnick overcomes the apparently relational and objectivist description of space and time to show that the exposition of the categories of relation is not only consistent with the constructivist theory of space and time, but presupposes it.