Manifest Reality

Kant's Idealism and his Realism

Bibliographic Data

ID8092492
AuthorsLucy Allais (corresponding author)
Year2015
Pages320
Publication date2015-09-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueManifest Reality (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198747130.001.0001
OpenAlexW4256168039
Open LibraryOL27517402M
ISBN9780198747130
LanguageEN
Citations received87

This book presents an interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism. It argues that his distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. He is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he does not assert the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects. It is argued that we cannot understand Kant’s idealism without a clear account of his notion of intuition and of the role of intuition in cognition: intuitions are representations that give us acquaintance with the objects of thought. Kant’s idealism limits empirical reality to that with which we can have acquaintance. He thinks that this empirical reality is mind-dependent in the sense that it is not experience-transcendent, rather than holding that it exists literally in our minds. Reading intuition in this way enables us to make sense of Kant’s central argument for his idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and to see why he takes the complete idealist position to be established there. This shows that reading a central part of his argument in the Transcendental Deduction as epistemological is compatible with a metaphysical, idealist reading of transcendental idealism

Historical Philosophy and Science · Kantian Philosophy and Modern Interpretations · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Psychology · Idealism · immanuel Kant (1724-1804) · Transcendentalism · Transzendentaler Idealismus