Cosmos

This chapter outlines the arguments in which Immanuel Kant claims to display the "conflicts of pure reason with itself", together with some standard, and some less standard, objections to those arguments. It re-presents the issues in a way as to show how one general form of "solution" is supposed to fit each of the "conflicts" concerned. The chapter discusses some interpretations of the general form of solution, each corresponding to a different version of transcendental idealism. It explores a fourth version of transcendental idealism, only to show that it does not generate a fourth interpretation of the solution. The chapter describes the cosmological questions themselves which are supposed to give rise to the conflicts, together with some non-Kantian lines of thought about them. Kant&s;s regular procedure in the antinomies is to establish in turn each of two apparently exhaustive alternatives (the "thesis" and the "antithesis") by proving the falsity of its apparent contradictory.

Physics · Historical and Architectural Studies