This blog was established a few weeks shy of a year ago. Since then I have enjoyed my first adventure into the mountains and mires of metaphysics. As my first real academic undertaking, I’m sure this essay will live on as historically interesting to at least my overly-introspective future self, and, he and I hope, philosophically interesting too. If you are he or any other interested party, pick up a copy of Proceedings Vol. 1, No. 2 if you want to experience it (or email jacobtrefethen@googlemail.com if you have no idea what that means).  It has been a beautiful journey, but we have only reached an oasis: the desert stretches still to the horizon, with promises of bluer and more bounteous waters, and this camel ride is not over.


For those who believed that Kant was claiming too much, and that the quest to establish a descriptive metaphysics of this sort was fated, this reconstruction should serve to give pause for reconsideration. There may still be those, like E. J. Lowe, who believe that Kant has not gone far enough, and has forgone ‘continuing to trade in reality, … for the comforts of certainty and empirical inviolability’ in perpetuating the distinction between our perceptions of objects and the wholly unknowable things-in-themselves. These people may hold that there is still work to be done towards establishing a metaphysics of possibilities that may not be certain, but is normative and ‘can indeed talk about reality’. Perhaps Lowe is right, to the extent that it does not contradict our current findings, and this is the case. Perhaps the scope of metaphysics is even wider than Kant anticipated. We have established the foundation of a metaphysics of our representations, and cannot yet say if this is a fully complete picture. Kant himself argued that there were twelve fundamental concepts beyond the pure intuitions of space and time that, as part of the faculty of Understanding, acted as further evidence for transcendental idealism. Whether we can build on our foundation towards a more closely neo-Kantian view or investigate bridging across to Lowe are questions in their own right. There is still work to be done in metaphysics.

Cleverly deployed in conjunction with a birthday, this has so far gained me physical copies of Individuals, The Bounds of Sense and Our Knowledge of the External World. If you ever start feeling particularly generous or keen to support my Quest you know where to go…

My title will be ‘A reconstruction of Kant’s “direct proof” of Transcendental Idealism.’

Widely, my 5000-word essay will be framed around answering three questions:

1. What is Kant’s picture of Transcendental Idealism; what does he think he has argued for?
2. What can he actually be said to have established; how strong are his arguments and how far can they be taken?
3. How might his arguments be reconstructed to be more sound and philosophically tenable; with reconstruction what can they at best establish?

I will address these with central focus on the Transcendental Aesthetic, the section of the Critique of Pure Reason where Kant claims he gives his ‘direct proof’ of transcendental idealism.

(1)What is Transcendental Idealism?

Kant held that his doctrine of transcendental idealism was a new, revolutionary way of looking at metaphysics. As a metaphysical position – a position that claims something about reality and the way the world is – it is transcendental in the sense that it follows from a priori analysis of our concepts: the position is formed without reference to any empirical investigation, so in this way it transcends our experience. In contrast to being realistic, the position is idealistic in the sense that it denies that the way objects appear to us is the way they actually are as ‘things-in-themselves’, separate from our perception of them. It crucially does not deny the existence of these objects outside of our mind, as all forms of idealism had done up to that point, but rather says that we cannot know anything at all about them, as we can only perceive things when they are filtered through our senses and the conceptual structuring of our mind.

This may sound all well and good, but how can Kant argue for its truth? Well, he first turns his attention to space and time. As all of the objects we perceive appear to be bound by space and time, if Kant can show that these are in fact not properties of the world but products of our mind – if they are the necessary way we structure our experience of the world but have no ontological presence (do not exist) in the world outside of us  – then the same can be said of all objects of perception that are caught up in them, and so transcendental idealism is supported. It is this argumentation that makes up the Transcendental Aesthetic, and it is to this that I turn my attention.

(2)How successful are Kant’s arguments for Transcendental Idealism?

Unfortunately, they are often rather unclear and always rather contentious. This applies to much of the Critique, but the Transcendental Aesthetic is particularly notorious for being both of the above.

When engaging in this evaluative part of the essay I intend to conduct in-depth textual analysis of the Metaphysical Expositions of the concepts of space and time (MEs; found within the Aesthetic), though I will touch briefly on the B-edition’s Transcendental Expositions (TEs; found directly following the MEs). I will look first at the first two (of four) arguments in the Metaphysical Expositions (which are roughly the same for space as for time), which argue for the a priori nature of space and time, and secondly at the following two arguments which argue for space and time being intuitions (as opposed to concepts). By ‘a priori’ here Kant means that ‘[s]pace is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences’(A23/B38), but is a necessary precondition and prerequisite for us to have any of this ‘outer experience’ of the world around us; we need the concept of space in order to have any outer experience at all (just as we need the concept of time in order to have any inner sense). By ‘intuition’ Kant means a ‘singular’ representation; a particular instance of perception as opposed to a general concept; an immediate, not mediate, representation.

If Kant manages to show that space and time are a priori intuitions, then he will have demonstrated that they are necessary preconditions for our experience, and that they are not concepts derived from our experience of the world. Subsequently any realist position would (he seems to hold) become untenable and his version of idealism wholly attractive. However, his arguments leave much to be desired. It is a point of critical contention, for example, and one left frustratingly ambiguous by Kant, whether the first and second arguments in the MEs can be read as two separate arguments or whether they are actually only valid when they act as two parts of the same argument. The problems run deeper than mere ambiguity (though there is a lot of that to go around): Bertrand Russell disregarded the second argument as being nothing more than speculative twitterings as it relies on the claim that it is ‘impossible to have a representation of there being no space’; Russell alleges that ‘no serious argument can be based on what we can or cannot imagine.’1

Though I will factor in many commentators on the Metaphysical Expositions, I will largely play Allison2, a keen Kant sympathiser and defender, against Strawson3, a keen banisher of Transcendental Idealism, as they are often regarded as offering the most compelling criticism on either side (as far as I have come across them this seems to be the case). In my treatment of this section I will highlight exactly which parts are most problematic, even on the most sympathetic reading of Kant.

(3)How can these arguments be improved?

There is, indeed, hope yet. Reconstructions of this part of the Critique have been attempted, most notably perhaps by Allison2 and also by Wojtowicz4, but I shall take the final leap that they as Kantian scholars could not: I shall escape the text. Instead of getting mired in interpretation and reinterpretation of what Kant may or may not have meant on various readings, I will leave Kant’s words behind when it is philosophically sensible and intellectually honest to do so. What I aim to do in this final section is to construct an updated and more rigorously founded version of transcendental idealism compatible with more modern philosophical and scientific thought: there is definitely something of inherent philosophical, not mere historical, value to be salvaged and built upon here and I shall do just that.

(It is inevitable that this third section will somewhat overlap with the second, and I do not propose to make any official distinction between the three different sections.)




1Russell, B. (1946). Kant. In A History of Western Philosophy (pp. 637-651). London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. More depth in Russell, B. (1914). Our Knowledge of the External World. London: Routledge.
2Allison, E. (2004). Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, Revised and Enlarged Edition. New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press.
3Strawson, P. (1966). The Bounds of Sense: an essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Methuen & Co Ltd.
4Wojtowicz, R. (1997). The Metaphysical Expositions of Space and Time. Synthese, Vol. 113, No. 1, 71-115.

CURRENT BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Primary texts:

Kant, I. (1929). Critique of Pure Reason (N. Kemp Smith, trans.). London: Macmillan and co. (Original work published 1781 & 1787)

Kant, I. (2007). Critique of Pure Reason (M. Weigelt & M. Muller, trans.). London: Penguin Books Ltd. (Original work published 1781 & 1787)

Hume, D. (2004). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Dover Publishing Inc. (Original work published 1748)

Leibniz, G. W. & Clarke, S. (1956). The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (P. G. Lucas, ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press (Original work published 1717)

Secondary texts:

Wojtowicz, R. (1997). The Metaphysical Expositions of Space and Time. Synthese, Vol. 113, No. 1, 71-115.

Russell, B. (1946). Kant. In A History of Western Philosophy (pp. 637-651). London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

Strawson, P. (1966). The Bounds of Sense: an essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Methuen & Co Ltd.

Allison, E. (2004). Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, Revised and Enlarged Edition. New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press.

Warren, D. (1998). Kant and the Apriority of Space. The Philosophical Review, Vol. 107, No. 2, 179-224.

FUTURE BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Primary texts:

Kant, I. (1997). Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science (P. Carus, trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Original work published 1783)

Kant, I. (1968). Inaugural Dissertation (G. B. Kerferd & D. E. Walford, trans.). Manchester: Manchester University Press (Original work published 1770)

Leibniz, G. W.  (1902). Discourse on Metaphysics and the Monadology (G. R. Montgomery, trans.). Chicago: Open Court (Original work published 1686 & 1714)

Secondary texts:

Bennett, J. (1966). Kant’s Analytic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Guyer, P. (1987). Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Russell, B. (1914). Our Knowledge of the External World. London: Routledge.

Bennett, J. (1968). Strawson on Kant. The Philosophical Review, Vol. 77, No. 3, 140-149.

Walsh, W. H. (1975). Kant’s Criticism of Metaphysics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Strawson, P. (1959). Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London: Methuen & Co Ltd.

CURRENT BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Primary texts: 

Kant, I. (1929). Critique of Pure Reason (N. Kemp Smith, trans.). London: Macmillan and co. (Original work published 1781 & 1787) 

Kant, I. (2007). Critique of Pure Reason (M. Weigelt & M. Muller, trans.). London: Penguin Books Ltd. (Original work published 1781 & 1787) 

Hume, D. (2004). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Dover Publishing Inc. (Original work published 1748) 

Secondary texts: 

Wojtowicz, R. (1997). The Metaphysical Expositions of Space and Time. Synthese, Vol. 113, No. 1, 71-115. 

Russell, B. (1946). Kant. In A History of Western Philosophy (pp. 637-651). London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 

Strawson, P. (1966). The Bounds of Sense: an essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Methuen & Co Ltd. 

Allison, E. (2004). Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, Revised and Enlarged Edition. New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press. 

FUTURE BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Primary texts: 

Kant, I. (1997). Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science (P. Carus, trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Original work published 1783) 

Leibniz, G. W.  (1902). Discourse on Metaphysics and the Monadology (G. R. Montgomery, trans.). Chicago: Open Court (Original work published 1686 & 1714) 

Secondary texts: 

Bennett, J. (1966). Kant’s Analytic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Guyer, P. (1987). Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Russell, B. (1914). Our Knowledge of the External World. London: Routledge. 

Bennett, J. (1968). Strawson on Kant. The Philosophical Review, Vol. 77, No. 3, 140-149.  

Walsh, W. H. (1975). Kant’s Criticism of Metaphysics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

The way Allison deals with the Antinomies of Pure Reason in Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defence, Revised and Enlarged Edition (although he only explicitly looks into the First and Third) is so comprehensive and interesting that I am almost inclined to broaden my topic to look at reconstructing Kant’s indirect argument for Transcendental Idealism as well as his direct argument given in the Transcendental Aesthetic (as I’m sure you will remember, the Antimonies act as his indirect argument).

Primary texts:

Kant, I. (1929). Critique of Pure Reason (Norman Kemp Smith, Trans.). London: Macmillan and co.. (Original work published 1781 & 1787)

Kant, I. (2007). Critique of Pure Reason (M. Weigelt & M. Muller, trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1781 & 1787)

Secondary texts:

Wojtowicz, R. (1997). The Metaphysical Expositions of Space and Time. Synthese, Vol. 113, No. 1, 71-115.

Russell, B. A History of Western Philosophy. 1945.

Strawson, B. The Bounds of Sense: an essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. 1966.

Allison, E. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, Revised and Enlarged Edition. 2004.

Future bibliography:

Bennett, J. (1968). Strawson on Kant. The Philosophical Review, Vol. 77, No. 3, 140-149.

Russell, B. Our Knowledge of the External World. 1914.
[Quoting Russell’s arguments against Kant from A History of Western Philosophy is a little damp… Here he gets in-depth.]

Guyer, P. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. 1987.
[Allison acknowledges Guyer as his primary, most rigorous and accurate critic following the publishing of his 1983 edition of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.)

Bennett, J. Kant’s Analytic. 1966.