IV—Kant's Argument for Transcendental Idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic |
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Authors: | Lucy Allais |
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Institution: | Department of Philosophy, University of the Witwatersrand, Jan Smuts Avenue, Braamfontein, Gauteng, South Africa. , Philosophy Department, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QN UK. |
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Abstract: | This paper gives an interpretation of Kant's argument for transcendental idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic. I argue against a common way of reading this argument, which sees Kant as arguing that substantive a priori claims about mind-independent reality would be unintelligible because we cannot explain the source of their justification. I argue that Kant's concern with how synthetic a priori propositions are possible is not a concern with the source of their justification, but with how they can have objects. I argue that Kant's notion of intuition needs to be understood as a kind of representation which involves the presence to consciousness of the object it represents, and that this means that a priori intuition cannot present us with a mind-independent feature of reality. |
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