Manifest Reality: Kant's Idealism and his Realism

by Lucy Allais

At the heart of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy is an epistemological and metaphysical position he calls transcendental idealism; the aim of this book is to understand this position. Despite the centrality of transcendental idealism in Kant's thinking, in over two hundred years since the publication of the first Critique there is still no agreement on how to interpret the position, or even on whether, and in what sense, it is a metaphysical position. Lucy Allais argue that Kant's distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. He is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he does not assert the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects. A central part of Allais's reading involves paying detailed attention to Kant's notion of intuition, and its role in cognition. She understands Kantian intuitions as representations that give us acquaintance with the objects of thought. Kant's idealism can be understood as limiting empirical reality to that with which we can have acquaintance. He thinks that this empirical reality is mind-dependent in the sense that it is not experience-transcendent, rather than holding that it exists literally in our minds. Reading intuition in this way enables us to make sense of Kant's central argument for his idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and to see why he takes the complete idealist position to be established there. This shows that reading a central part of his argument in the Transcendental Deduction as epistemological is compatible with a metaphysical, idealist reading of transcendental idealism.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2015

Reviews

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucy Allais has incredible clarity, especially given the subject, and an admirable intellectual honesty. Philosophy scholarship needs way more people like her.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

makes kant understandable. very nice

[Jonathan Hockey · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting attempt to reconcile Kant's realism with his idealism. Whether the deduction can be viewed separately from his transcendental idealism as almost an independent argument establishing a theory of reference that in places realists would be content with could be questioned. For the issue is how to establish the key points of necessity and necessity specifically regarding a synthetic a priori intuition of some sort of spatial manifold that in some way can be reconciled with the surrounding reality as we directly perceive it as epistemological subjects. The weak link, as was seen by Neo-Kantians and Analytic philosophy is regarding linking necessity to a synthetic a priori intuition. For 20th century mathematics and physics suggest that we do not require a synthetic a priori intuition to engage with those subject matters anymore. Hence their necessity tends to be limited more to hypothetical and conditional claims. Kant and a viable Kantian epistemology of course wants more than this, but how to achieve it? Personally I don't think the synthetic a priori is a reliable or credible source of the necessity and we must look elsewhere, but besides this divergence of point of view, the rest of Allais' analysis I find to be intriguing and quite accurate.