Transcendental Idealism and Ontological Agnosticism

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dustin McWherter
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Present Essay

AbstractSince the initial reception of the Critique of Pure Reason transcendental idealism has been perceived and criticized as a form of subjective idealism regarding space, time, and the objects within them, despite Kant's protestations to the contrary. In recent years, some commentators have attempted to counter this interpretation by presenting transcendental idealism as a primarily epistemological doctrine rather than a metaphysical one. Others have insisted on the metaphysical character of transcendental idealism. Within these debates, Kant's rejection of ontology (of the kind exemplified by Wolff and Baumgarten) has received comparatively little treatment, although it is often acknowledged. The present essay seeks to contribute to the secondary literature on Kant by offering an analysis of this claim and elaborating its consequences for transcendental idealism. This will take the form of a critical examination of transcendental idealism's supposed ontological agnosticism—that is, its disavowal of any ontological claims. The overall conclusion is that Kant's rejection of ontology is deeply problematic, and to such an extent that it may be necessary to reconsider the possibilities of defending transcendental idealism as a purely epistemological, non-ontological doctrine.

Some Persistent Presumptions of Hegelian Anti-Subjectivism

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-152
Author(s):  
Karl Ameriks
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Critical System ◽  
Theoretical Philosophy

This chapter responds primarily to a recent criticism of Kant by Stephen Houlgate. Like many other recent Hegelian accounts, Houlgate’s severe critique of Kant’s theoretical philosophy contends that, in contrast to Hegel, Kant’s Critical system, especially because of its doctrine of transcendental idealism, presupposes a subjectivist and therefore inadequate position. On the basis of a moderate interpretation of Kant’s idealism and his general Critical procedure, the chapter defends Kant from the charge of subjectivism, and also gives an account of how subjectivist interpretations in general can arise from a series of understandable misunderstandings of difficult passages in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

Transcendental idealism and metaphysics: Kant’s commitment to things as they are in themselves

Kant Yearbook ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Allais
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Epistemological Position ◽  
Metaphysical Position ◽  
The Way

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.

Berkeley's Immaterialism and Kant's Transcendental Idealism

1982 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 51-69
Author(s):  
M. R. Ayers
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
The Senses

Ever since its first publication critics of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason have been struck by certain strong formal resemblances between transcendental idealism and Berkeley's immaterialism. Both philosophers hold that the sensible world is mind-dependent, and that from this very mind-dependence we can draw a refutation of scepticism of the senses.

Necessity, Existence and Transcendental Idealism

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 55-77
Author(s):  
Robert Greenberg
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
The Other ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
A Priori Knowledge ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Correct Interpretation ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Other Hand

The role of transcendental idealism in Kant's theory of knowledge has been both deliberately underrated1 and inadvertently exaggerated. If conceivably not necessary, its role in Kant's explanation of the possibility of a priori knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason is at least pivotal to the success of the explanation. On the other hand, though transcendental idealism depends on Kant's epistemological criterion of an existing object, or, simply, his criterion of existence, the criterion for its part is actually independent of the idealism. In fact, it may be because this independence has hardly been recognized that commentators have been unaware of the role the criterion may actually be playing in the continuing controversy over the correct interpretation of the idealism. Altogether, this article addresses both shortcomings – the underestimation and the exaggeration of the role of the idealism in Kant's epistemology. While it places the idealism at the centre of the epistemology, it also separates the criterion of existence from the idealism. In highlighting this contrast, the article explains how the criterion may actually be contributing to the persistence of the ongoing dispute over the correct interpretation of the idealism.

Kant on the Ideality of Space

1988 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Rogerson
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Sense Data ◽  
The World ◽  
Independent Reality

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argues for a position he calls transcendental idealism. And although it comes as no surprise to claim that Kant was an idealist, it is far from clear how this idealism should be understood. Traditionally, Kant’s idealism has been understood as a version of phenomenalism. ‘Objects of experience’ (appearances) are constructions of mental data caused by mind independent reality (the realm of things in themselves). This reading has been labeled the ‘ontological’ interpretation since on this view ‘objects of experience’ are ontologically dependent on our minds and ontologically distinct from the world outside of our minds. And, corresponding to the supposed ‘two worlds’ of objects, it is thought that Kant allows for two perspectives from which objects can be described. Human descriptions are limited to the mere collections of sense data while God can describe the set of objects outside our mind as they really are ‘in themselves.’

scholarly journals Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories: Critical Re-Examination, Elucidation and Corroboration

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth R. Westphal
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Transcendental Deduction

Immanuel Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction of the Categories’ addresses issues centrally debated today in philosophy and in cognitive sciences, especially in epistemology, and in theory of perception. Kant’s insights into these issues are clouded by pervasive misunderstandings of Kant’s ‘Deduction’ and its actual aims, scope, and argument. The present edition with its fresh and accurate translation and concise commentary aims to serve these contemporary debates as well as continuing intensive and extensive scholarship on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Two surprising results are that ‘Transcendental Deduction’ is valid and sound, and it holds independently of Kant’s transcendental idealism. This lucid volume is interesting and useful to students, yet sufficiently detailed to be informative to specialists.

Mendelssohn, Kant, and Idealism

2020 ◽  
pp. 167-202
Author(s):  
Paul Guyer
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Transcendental Argument ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
External Objects ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Refutation Of Idealism ◽  
Empirical Realism

After examining the dispute between Mendelssohn and Kant over the ideality of time in 1770, this chapter argues that Kant’s addition of a “Refutation of Idealism” to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787 is a response to Mendelssohn’s treatment of idealism in his 1785 Morning Hours. Both defend the position that Kant calls empirical realism, but only Kant defends it by means of a transcendental argument that knowledge of external objects is a necessary condition of empirical self-knowledge, although only within the framework of transcendental idealism. Mendelssohn accepts that human experience can never tell us how things are in themselves, but does not accept Kant’s outright denial of the non-spatiality and non-temporality of things in themselves.

Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind

1987 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Pippin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
The Self ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
General Issue ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Recent Attention

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant refers often and with no apparent hesitation or sense of ambiguity to the mind (das Gemüt). He does so not only in his justly famous destruction of rationalist proofs of immaterialism, but throughout his own, positive, ‘transcendental’ account in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic. In the first edition of the Critique, he even proposed what he adventurously called a ‘transcendental psychology’ and, although this strange discipline seemed to disappear in the second edition, he left in that edition all his frequent references to forms ‘lying in the mind,’ and to the mind, or the self, or the subject of experience, or the ego, doing this or that. Curiously, though, despite an extensive secondary literature, there is in that literature relatively little discussion of what these expressions, in a proper, strictly Kantian sense, are supposed to refer to. There are two imaginative, extremely suggestive articles by Sellars, some hints at connections with eighteenth century psychology offered by Weldon, a tenebrous book by Heidemann, and some recent attention to the general issue of ‘Kant's theory of mind’ by Ameriks and Kitcher.

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