Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. ;The thesis explores selected topics concerning both Kant's view of sensibility and of the extent of possible a priori knowledge of the objects of outer and inner sense, and his theory of the imagination, which topics it is argued, all qualify as or involve neglected aspects of his metaphysics of experience. ;It consists of six chapters and an appendix. ;Chapter One looks at Kant's thesis of an inseparable connection between human intuition and sensibility and rejects his claim that this is established in the Transcendental Aesthetic. ;Chapter Two examines Kant's distinction between apperception and inner sense in the Duisburg'sche Nachlass of 1775, and argues against the view that he attributes to inner sense here that function which he later assigns to the imagination. ;Chapter Three treats of Kant's theory of the empirical and transcendental imagination, and considers its importance in relation to his argument in the Transcendental Deduction, his theory of schematism and his distinction between judgements of experience and of perception. ;Chapter Four investigates the extent to which Kant's refutations of idealism of 1781 and 1787 presuppose his transcendental idealist perspective on the relation between outer sense and the imagination, and rest on an appeal to the transcendental substrate of outer appearance. ;Chapter Five examines Kant's reasons for rejecting the possibility of both an applied metaphysics of thinking nature and an empirical science of psychology. ;Chapter Six looks at Kant's metaphysics of corporeal nature as he presents this in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and in the Opus Postumum's theory of transition , whereby he seeks to bring empirical physics under the umbrella of transcendental philosophy. ;The Appendix presents Kant's conception from 1781 to 1803 of the relation between transcendental philosophy and metaphysics