Manifest reality : Kant's idealism and his realism
Lucy Allais (Author)
Lucy Allais presents an original interpretation of Kant's transcendental idealism. Her account of spatio-lemporal reality in Kant accommodates both his empirical realism and his idealism: the spatio-temporal objects of our cognition do not exist literally in our minds but are not experience-transcendent. She defends the view that Kant is committed to there being a way things are as they are in themselves, independently of us, but argues that this should not be understood as a commitment to non-spatio-temporal objects. Kant holds that spatio-temporal appearances must be grounded in something metaphysically more fundamental that we cannot cognize. On Allais's account, central to understanding Kant's Idealism, his argument for idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic and his reasons for thinking that we cannot cognize things as they are in themselves. She presents new readings of central parts of the Transcendental Deduction, arguing that Kant's concern with synthesis is not about producing intuitions (presentations of perceptual particulars) but rather about what must be done to intuition in order for concept application to be possible. She sees this part of the argument as epistemological and not dependent on Kant's idealism, and presents a new account of how Kant's idealism explains the possibility of metaphysics. Allais shows how Kant's position is a careful combination of realism and idealism, and of metaphysical and epistemological concerns, and navigates the textual evidence which has been taken to support the unstable extremes of radical idealist and non-metaphysical readings
Print Book, English, 2015
First edition
Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2015