Abstract

There May Be No Succinct Way to articulate Kant’s doctrine of transcendental idealism without begging certain interpretive questions. Roughly, however, it is the tripartite doctrine that The objects of outer sense, along with those of inner sense, are mere appearances, not things in themselves. Space and time are merely forms of these appearances, and thus things in themselves are neither spatial nor temporal. We can have no cognition (Erkenntnis) of things in themselves. One’s understanding of these claims turns mostly on how one understands the distinction between things in themselves and appearances. And this distinction is where much of the interpretive controversy lies. In this paper ..