Transcendental idealism and metaphysics: Kant’s commitment to things as they are in themselves
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Lucy Allais
Abstract
One of Kant’s central central claims in the Critique of Pure Reason is that we cannot have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. This claim has been regarded as problematic in a number of ways: whether Kant is entitled to assert both that there are things in themselves and that we cannot have knowledge of them, and, more generally, what Kant’s commitment to things in themselves amounts to. A number of commentators deny that Kant is committed to there actually being an aspect of reality which we cannot cognise; they argue that he is committed merely to the idea that we cannot avoid the concept of things as they are in themselves. I will argue in this paper that while transcendental idealism is partly an epistemological position, it is also partly a metaphysical position, and in specific, that Kant is committed to the claim that the things we cognise have, in addition to the way they appear to us, a nature that is independent of us, which we cannot cognise.
© 2019 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Contents
- Transcendental idealism and metaphysics: Kant’s commitment to things as they are in themselves
- Kant and the Understanding’s Role in Imaginative Synthesis
- Pure Reason’s Enlightenment: Transcendental Reflection in Kant’s first Critique
- Kant on the Soul’s Intensity
- The Aeneas Argument: Personality and Immortality in Kant’s Third Paralogism
- Kant’s Epistemological Reorientation of Ontology
- Kant’s conception of self as subject and its embodiment
- Time and Metaphysics: Kant and McTaggart on the Reality of Time
- List of Contributors
- Note to the STUDI KANTIANI, XXII, 2009
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Contents
- Transcendental idealism and metaphysics: Kant’s commitment to things as they are in themselves
- Kant and the Understanding’s Role in Imaginative Synthesis
- Pure Reason’s Enlightenment: Transcendental Reflection in Kant’s first Critique
- Kant on the Soul’s Intensity
- The Aeneas Argument: Personality and Immortality in Kant’s Third Paralogism
- Kant’s Epistemological Reorientation of Ontology
- Kant’s conception of self as subject and its embodiment
- Time and Metaphysics: Kant and McTaggart on the Reality of Time
- List of Contributors
- Note to the STUDI KANTIANI, XXII, 2009
